I'm using a first generation iPod Mini. That is pretty much my budget for now. It works generally ok, although the battery life is rather low.
Early on I found out it doesn't handle VBR well. The major problem is that it often believes it is at the end of a track a few seconds, or sometimes a fair number of seconds, before that track actually ends, so it starts on the next track without finishing the one it was playing.
So I encoded everything (audio books) as CBR. That has worked well for quite some time. Now suddenly it is doing the same thing on CBR. I just started a new book, so I don't yet know if this is a general error, but I would like to find out if there is any know problem. Is there something I might look at in the audio data that could contribute?
In the current situation I extracted an audio book from CD and encoded it as I have others (CBR 64kbs mono @ 22050kHz). When the end of the second track was skipped, I went to the computer file and found that nothing is missing there. It plays fine on-computer but is consistently wrong on the iPod.
I deleted the book from the iPod, along with another 12+ hour book. After reloading the source mp3 back onto the iPod, I find the same playback error on the same track.