Shuffle owners report some iTMS songs incompatible

I can't say I ran into this problem myself, but I converted all my songs into MP3s anyway to avoid such a problem.

I ran into this problem last friday when i purchased "Wasted" by Goldfinger. It seems that something about the iTMS file makes it where it won't play on the iPod shuffle (it's been tried on 3 shuffles) but will play fine in both iTunes and the other iPod types (mini, photo, regular iPod).

After Apple having me redownload it and still experiencing the same issue, I eventually took the iTMS file, burned it, then re-imported it into iTunes and that worked . . . so (at least in my case) there's clearly something wrong with the file that iTunes is selling. Note: out of the 600 songs i've bought on iTunes this was the first time i've had an issue but it's something that keeps me worrying about purchasing more music that my shuffle won't play.

Sometimes all my iTMS songs won't play, I just restart the Shuffle and tada they play again.

Did you try setting iTunes to reencode the music for the shuffle (limit to 128k)?

This shouldn't have anything to do with reencoding. A song purchased from the iTMS should play without any modification being required. I have over 600 purchased songs that play fine and one that will not play in any of the 3 shuffles it's been tried on. However it will play when tried on an iPod photo and iPod mini. After looking at the posted linked in the above story it seems clear that there's an obvious issue with certain songs on the iTMS and the shuffle. . . very frustrating if you're a shuffle owner that's bought songs you can't play without burning them and reencoding.

But iTMS is already 128K, so that won't make it reencode it

I wish it were that easy. The affected downloads lock your shuffle. If you turn it off and back on, the second you reach the affected iTMS song file it locks again.

The only solution i've found thusfar is to either get a regular iPod,photo or mini. Or burn the song to a disk, reimport it, then transfer it to your shuffle . . . hardly an ideal solution when it should work without modification. Not to mention the amount of time and money that one track is costing after all that (time ripping, blank CD, etc.)

I've had random bugs appear every now and the with my 1 gig Shuffle. One day I'll turn it on and it will skip over a huge swath of songs that it would play the day before (and no, I'm not tapping the PLAY button multiple times nor have it on Shuffle setting or anything, I let the song proceeding the gap end, only to have it jump 20 tracks)

Another fun "feature" is when the songs are removed from the Shuffle and it refuses to believe they are gone when I try to re-sync it with iTunes. The Shuffle will be recognized and it will do the usual "Updating iPod" thing for a few seconds and then fail to recognize that several songs on the list are not present on the device.

A special thanks to whomever decided on the "Hey, let's just delete this" feature. I have a 700Mhz G3 iBook with a 20 Gig internal hard drive and I keep my iTunes folder on an external Firewire disk. Needless to say, when I'm on the road it is much easier to plug the Shuffle in with the Power Adapter attached and nothing else, rather than unpacking and hooking up the HD when all I want to do is charge it.

Found myself in a hotel room last month with only a short time before I had to depart. Plugged the Shuffle into my iBook sans external HD.

Big Mistake.

It went to the usual "Updating iPod" banner at the top of iTunes and kept "Updating" for longer than normal. I suddenly had a bad feeling, and quit out of iTunes. Checked the Shuffle only to find out that iTunes noticed my Library wasn't available when the device was attached, so it simply decided to go through and begin deleting every single song one-by-one without asking or even informing me of what it was doing.

Facing a long road-trip, I crammed 241 songs on there downsampled into AAC. It would have taken hours to reconvert them on the fly and copy the songs back onto the iPod. I spent the next day in a car with 1/3rd of my playlist gone.

I'd love to know who came up with that feature.