So... my pops got me a fancy schmancy 30GB 5G iPod for xmas, without me asking. I'm not complaining.

I wasn't here when it got delivered by Fed-Ex, they ship it back to factory, then back to me and I finally got it yesterday.

I spent the past week getting album art for 98% of my 90+ GB of music rocking in iTunes using iArt, a decent $10 PC shareware app for doing just that.

I load up the iPod with about 25GB, and it won't play, it just skips tracks... 1, 2, 3, 4, showing name but won't play. Sometimes the album art shows after a few seconds before it skips to the next track... sometimes it'll play a few seconds then skip to the next track. Other times it just locks up for minutes at a time.

So I reformat it, and try again, same result. Start doing research... similar symptoms for others on the apple support forums... related to album art (sometimes lyrics). So I turn off "show album art on iPod"... bingo. Everything plays fine after iTunes deletes all the album art from the iPod.

So I start with the hypothisis that the album art gathering program I used hosed the tags and the iPod is choking. So I go through and change a field for all the tracks in a batch in iTunes (BPM), then remove it, so that iTunes was the last thing to touch the tags and hopefully cleaned them up to it's liking.

Then I wonder if it's the massive amount of album art I have (nearly every track) so I start loading up small chunks at a time and checking it out. All seems to be working fine until I get to the K's... and bam, it starts happening again, locking up and whatnot. So it's not the tag issue. Must just be the album art database size.

Anyone else have this issue? Any ideas what to do about it? I'm thinking about making a static page describing the issue and posting it all over the mac sites and forums.