Ever experience skipping music on your iPod? You want to listen to some music, but when you press play it just keeps skipping to the next song. When your music sounds bad or skips during playback on your iPod or iPhone, here's what to look for and how to fix it.

1) Old Apple Software/Firmware

Are you using the latest and greatest versions of iTunes and Quicktime? What about your iPod or iPhone? Have you updated them with the newest Firmware? Always update your computer and your iPod/iPhone with the latest software before troubleshooting.

2) Damaged Headphones

You may have a bad pair of headphones. For example, someone here in the office once ruined a pair of Apple earbuds a few years ago when they accidentally left their iPod on while inside their backpack at work. The volume was turned on full blast and blew out the headphones after playing until the iPod's battery ran out. Later that night they tried to listen to their iPod but all the music sounded like crap. After troubleshooting the iPod for about an hour, we eventually hooked up a new pair of headphones and everything on the iPod sounded fine.

Image from Flickr user emagic.

3) Weird EQ Setting

Also check under SETTINGS for the EQ function. You may have a weird setting like TREBBLE BOOST on. This would make all your music sound like AM radio. While troubleshooting, try turning the EQ off.

Change your EQ setting here on your iPod: Settings > EQ (after troubleshooting, adjust the EQ setting to your liking).

4) Defrag Your iPod

Music glitches, pauses and skips on your hard drive based iPod probably mean one thing: a fragmentation (see image below). Do you have a disk utility program? Try a program like Norton Systemworks (PC), Drive Genius (Mac) or Disk Warrior (Mac) and run the defragmentation feature on your iPod, as if it were an external drive.

Also, running a disk utility check on your iPod every few months is a good idea. These utility programs can even help make a stubborn hard drive mount in iTunes.

Depending on how badly your hard drive is fragmented, you may need to erase your iPod and start over. If you care about the content on your iPod, please explore all other options listed in this article before erasing it.

5) Defrag Your Computer

If you have problems with music skipping on your computer, you should run the same defrag programs mentioned above on the hard drive that contains all your iTunes music.

6) Bad File Imports and Damaged Songs

If you are still getting music glitches in iTunes or on your iPod and this primarily only happens with specific songs, then you may have a damaged song file.

When you import CDs into iTunes make sure:

• You have enough hard drive space on your computer.
• If you have a slow computer and/or not a lot or RAM, quit all other programs (besides iTunes) during the import process.

When I imported a few CDs on an old slow computer, I got lots of bad quality audio files. The skips and glitches in your songs may be your computer choking during the import.

The other reason for skipping tracks could be some form of copy protection. Read the fine print on the back of the CD cover and on the disc itself. Some additional information about copy protection issues may be provided.

7) Use Compressed Songs

The iPod's skip protection works best with compressed audio files. This allows multiple songs to fit into iPod's 32 MB memory cache. If your audio files are large, or are uncompressed (such as songs in AIFF or WAV format), you may want to compress them, and use the MP3 or AAC compressors when importing new songs. Just put the original CD back in your computer and change your import settings in iTunes. Import the music. Then delete the bad music off your iPod and copy the newly imported music onto it.

Also, if you are having problems with high bitrate MP3s, convert the files to AAC files at either 160 or 128.

8) Run the iPod Diagnostic Test

Your iPod may be suffering from a bad sector issue. You can try putting your iPod into diagnostic mode [tutorial] and scan the hard drive for bad blocks. If you find some bad blocks, try running a a full read/write test. This will remap what bad sectors it can and erase all the data on your iPod.

9) Physical Damage

If nothing listed here works, you may also hear a loud irregular clicking or spinning noise. That's the sad song of a bad hard drive. Your only real option now is to send it out to get fixed or replaced. Try our VIP Repair Service. Well if you do have to send it in to get fixed, you might want to upgrade the hard drive size while you are at it.