Quickly check for corrupt songs

Jul 26, '06 07:30:03AM

Contributed by: rgovostes

Last week I was listening to a playlist on my 4G iPod when I noticed it skipped a song. To investigate, I plugged it into my Mac and tried playing the same one through iTunes, but instead a little exclamation point popped up next to it in the list, indicating that the file was damaged or missing. Further investigation showed that 28 of 399 songs had the same problem, and Disk Utility didn't think anything was suspect.

The immediate thought I had was to try playing every file in my iPod, but this is time consuming (even if you only play one second of each, it adds up), and there doesn't seem to be a way to group the !s through sorting.

The best solution I found is to select all of the iPod's songs and use the Get Info window to set the rating on every file to 1 (be careful that you don't edit anything else). When it's finished, sort the list by My Rating to group the corrupt tracks together (in my case, they all had 0 stars).

(This will, of course, remove all useful ratings from your iPod. If you find them valuable, you can do the same trick with any field, like Comments or BPM. This is also an option if the corrupt song files have ratings, too.)

Finally, select all of the corrupt songs, copy, then delete. The corrupt songs will be deleted from your iPod while their track names will be saved to the clipboard. You can paste this into TextEdit so you know which files need to be re-copied. Unfortunately, you'll be on your own in remembering which playlists they belonged to.

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