morose code

After hearing it featured in a beer commercial, I recently bought Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" off of his "Heart Shaped World" album. It's a great, melancholy song for chez Morose. However, every time I listen to it, 9 seconds in there is a quick "blip" sound, whether I listen to it in iTunes or on my iPod. Also, when listening to it on my iPod it will skip to the next track after 21 seconds. I thought perhaps that I didn't get it all downloaded somehow, but the track is the full 4:49 and fast forwarding past the 21 second mark allows it to play normally to the end.

I emailed Apple and I got back what looks to be a form reply. Its advice was:

If you are experiencing difficulty transferring your purchased music to your iPod, we encourage you to consult the following article:

Songs from iTunes Music Store do not copy to your iPod
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93867

To play songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store using iTunes version 4.5 or later on your iPod, we recommend that you update to the most current version of the iPod software as well as the latest version of iTunes. To see whether your iPod needs to be updated, visit: http://www.apple.com/ipod/download/

For instructions on updating your iPod, please refer to the following Knowledge Base article:

Updating iPod's software
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n60944

If you continue to experience difficulty transferring music to your iPod, please call Apple technical support at 800-APL-CARE (800-275-2273). Help is available seven days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. central time. The representative will determine whether a per-incident fee will be associated with the call.

You might consider the AppleCare Protection Plan for iPod. It offers phone support and hardware coverage for two years from the purchase date of the iPod.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.apple.com/support/products/applecareipod.html

The links they provided are of no help. My iPod and iTunes are already updated to the latest version and getting the song on to the iPod isn't the problem, it playing correctly is. I suspect that the noise artifact means I have bought a bad file from the iTMS. Browsing through the forums at iPodlounge hasn't helped much, either. There were a couple of threads offering suggestions for the skipping problem whose solutions included docking the iPod and manually playing and skipping every song on it in iTunes or restoring it and recopying 30 gigs of music back on. Of course, neither would fix the "blip" noise.

So here I am hoping someone out there has had a similar problem and can offer an easy solution rather than me spend all afternoon with Apple's phone staff and having them charge me for the pleasure.