iTunes: Possibly corrupted AAC library

[Baloo]

iBook G4
Mac OS X 10.3.9
iTunes 6.0.4

Cavalry usb2.0/fw400 external hard drive (using the fw connection)
(originally formatted for PC*)

experience: novice


My problem originated when I purchased a new external hard drive to back up my overcrowded internal drive.

I'm afraid that I can not recall the exact order of things that I did, as I went back and forth a number of times, but essentially after unsuccessfully trying to back up a number of large folders onto my external drive I realized that my external drive had to be reformatted for Mac OS (perhaps calling myself a novice is way too much credit). With the help of a tech assistant over the phone I reformatted the drive. (The complication is that previously I had done some work to consolidate my iTunes library on the ext. drive - my library had actually been split between 2 folders - and I may have erased my iTunes folders from my int. drive and copied in my "consolidated" library from the external drive before I formatted it, because I didn't want to lose that work. I can't quite remember if I ended up doing this, sorry.

My actual problem is that after going through this process, my aac files wont play. All the music files in my library now skip (both mp3s and AACs). But when the AAC files reach the first "skip" point in the song, they stop playing and move to the next song. I can scan to points beyond these skip points in the song, and the file is there to be played, but it moves to the next song as soon as it reaches the next skip point. (When I play the songs from their actual files --> get info: preview, they play through continuously, but there are small pieces of the tracks actually blotted out or missing.) Obviously this renders the 1600+ AAC files in my library useless.

My intuition is that these songs have been spliced somehow (assumedly in being copied in and out of the external drive), and that they have not been joined back together correctly (assumedly because I am a doofus and put them on a PC drive).
Of course, my intuition does not count for a whole lot.

If you could shed any light on to why these files are behaving this way or any potential way of fixing the problem, that would be awesome. I am a musician, so any insight you can offer into getting my music back will be greatly appreciated.

Jake

(I tried to find answers to my problem on forums for a long time, but my problem just seemed a little too specific.)

[stureid41]

Jake, I have the same! I tranferred my entire iTunes directory with all the audio files (all aac) to a new computer. All the files appeared to transfer correctly, as did all the document and picture files being tranferred at the same time. However, I now notice that at least one song in almost every album is corrupt in some way, exactly as you describe.

I have no idea how to fix this, or indeed how the problem was created. Does anyone know a possible solution?