iPhone MP3 skipping, works in iTunes?
I just synced an mp3 album I had downloaded and copied into iTunes on my iPhone (1st gen, not a 3G), but every song was stuttering and skipping. The files themselves are fine–they all play fine in iTunes. The file I was trying to play had the following attributes:
Bitrate: 96 kbps
Encoder: FhG
Tags: ID3 v1/v2
Sample Rate: 44.100 khz
Trolling through online forums, the following advice was offered:
- Use the “Rock EQ” preset (didn’t work for me, and I tried turning EQ Off / Soundcheck On/Off too)
- Restore the iPhone (that sounds like a pain)
- Delete the playlist and remove all the songs from the phone, then create a new playlist and resync them
- Convert the music to AAC (right-click, convert to AAC)
Since the last option is the easiest, I tried it. And it worked–smooth playback. It’s possible that there really was something horrible with the files, as they stutter in VLC too!
Drobo Pro Announced!
I’m a huge fan of the massive (but slow) bulk storage devices made by Drobo. I own two of the Data Robotics Drobos. They’ll save you from losing data if a single drive fails, and a single enclosure can hold 4 drives for up to 8TB of storage. Sure, they’re relatively slow compared to a single drive, RAID, or an SSD, but they’re perfect for an external hard drive for home storage.
And now they’ve upped the ante with the Drobo Pro, an 8-bay enterprise version of the Drobo.
There’s a new “Dual Disk Redundancy” option will spread the data out such that the Drobo Pro array can suffer two simultaneous drive failures without any loss of data or interrupted service. You can even toggle this option on and off without having to rebuild the array. There’s also new connectivity via gigabit ethernet (iSCSI) as well as the older FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 ports. Linux, Windows, and Mac are supported, on NTFS, HFS Plus, EXT3 and FAT32. For more details, check out the data sheet.
You can buy one now for $1,300 from the Drobo store, or $900 if you exchange two old drobos for the new shiny model, something I’m horribly tempted to do right now.
