I'm frighteningly close to throwing a $400 iPod against the concrete wall to my immediate right.

Cross post to vidiotgeek and macintosh

The problem?

It has stopped syncing with iTunes. More accurately it will begin to synchronize my music and at some point, will freeze on a random song and sit there indefinitely. Normally it takes anywhere from 1~3 seconds to copy a song to the iPod depending on size and it has been sitting on track number 510 of 3687 for about 20 minutes. It is clearly not going to finish. I've reformatted the drive at least 3 times and used the iPod updater to restore it to factory settings each time. I've even zeroed the disk to destroy all the data on it besides erasing the T.O.C. and each time it has froze mid sync.

I formatted it in FAT-32, Reformatted into HFS+ with zeroing the data then ran the iPod Restore, then reformatted then ran the restore (yes, I know that the restore reformats it anyway) and then went through the setup in iTunes twice, once after each format. The problem started while I was running 10.4.1 and it's still doing it after I updated to 10.4.2 earlier tonight (in hopes the update would fix something that had gone wrong under the hood) I'm going to try turning off auto-sync even though it's a big pain in the ass to have to manually place the songs onto the iPod. That might work...but I'm gonna be pissed if that's how I have to use it from here out.

What makes it worse is that after it hangs up, I can't quit iTunes. Those of you who use Macs (2 of you?) know that on the relatively rare occasion that an app freezes on you, you can hit the Apple 3 fingered salute (option + command + esc) and force quit the application. I used to be able to say with confidence, "At least when you do have to 'end task' on a Mac, the program actually goes away." No more, apparently. I hit Force Quit, it brings up the box I choose iTunes and it doesn't go away. It sits there...mocking me in its defiance to go away peacefully and let me continue to use my computer while denying that the Mac isn't "just working." No. It stares me down as if to say..."I'm not going anywhere and just for trying to get rid of me, you won't be able to shut down or restart either." Yep...I have to hold down the power button to turn the computer off and then back on.

I guess the good news is that I can still use the computer. iTunes has been frozen since before I even opened Xjournal to write this post about it. And I was still happily looking at stuff in Safari which had no adverse effects. Looking in Activity Monitor, there are 2 processes that are hung, SystemUIServer which is a process under my name and then coreaudiod which is under root. Every time this happens, those two are always not responding so I'm assuming it has something to do with both of them. It's really pissing me off.

My iPod is a discontinued model. The 40gig with black & white screen. If it keeps this shit up, guess who's raising hell and swapping it for a 60gig iPod with a color screen?

Now for attempt number 4.

***********EDIT***********
After each cycle when I restart the computer, I have to repair the disk in order for the Mac to mount it on the desktop. So it clearly messes something up on the iPod, meaning it's doubtful that it's just an software issue on the Mac. Or rather that it's more likely that there is a problem with the iPod that is causing the software to freak out and subsequently mess up the file system on the iPod each time.

After running the restore on the iPod, the iPod reboots and gives me a less-than-helpful "folder with a ! " icon with the url: www.apple.com/support/ipod/ below it.

And I also turned off every auto update feauter the iPod had and tried syncing a handful of songs (67 of almost 4000 is just a drop in the bucket) it got to 16 before it froze as I sit looking at it. I'm going to try doing 2 songs at a time. Just 2 at a time....noahs ark style. and if it screws up doing that simple of a transfer....hello concrete wall. In either case, I'm making a stop by the Apple store tomorrow to see if they can help me out at all and worst case scenario, I come home with a new iPod. That's all for tonight.