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That's really hard to know for sure. It could easily be a bad sector in the current *physical* track that's mucking things up, outside of the sectors actually needed to play the song.

But surely it would have to be an intermittently bad sector, or it would have failed the first time it played the track too? For a song to get a few seconds in and then stop, it must have blocked the audio thread, which means a read() of the next 64K of MP3 data -- exactly the same read which had been issued the first time the track was cached -- has blocked. But yeah, a bad-blocks scan will at least help eliminate some types of disk failure as suspects. If we're lucky it'll show up heat-related problems too.

Peter