iPod Troubles

I haven't been updating too often in the past week or so. I've been much busier at work, which is probably a good thing. But also, I've been using any free time at home or work trying to figure out what has gone wrong with my iPods. They both simultaneously began displaying odd behavior, and I've been scouring message boards and making phone calls to figure out why. Here's my post on Apple's discussions website which details my plight. I don't think the iPods are broken, I just think I've accidentally corrupted all of the files and...well...I delete things:

I have a 2 month old 120gb Classic. I use it with a Mac. To save space, I delete most of my audio files from the mac after they are uploaded to the iPod (i trust it too much).

Anyway, over the weekend I updated iTunes AND I was using a program called "ipoddisk" to pull files from the iPod and put them back on the laptop. Either the iTunes update or using "ipoddisk" seems to have corrupted most of the mp3s on my iPod. I'm leaning towards the iTunes update. The iPod still connects perfectly to iTunes, but when I try to play the files they are unrecognized (marked with a little exclamation point.)If I try to play them on the iPod itself they are still recognized and accounted for by the memory, and the artwork and song information (song length, genre, etc.) is still there, they just simply won't play. They stop at 0:00 and never advance. This seems to have happened to MOST of the files. Suspiciously enough, a lot of the music by artists with names lower in the alphabet (AFI, Academy Is, Blink 182) still work, but after D or so, nothing works except random songs.

Nothing has actually said "corrupt" to me, but I can't figure out why the songs won't play anywhere. When the iPod is connected to iTunes and I try to play the non-working songs, I can literally feel my iPod "try" to load the song (the disk spins a bit), but nothing happens and the files still have an exclamation point. I also tried to maybe change ID3 tags, but apparently I can't.

I'm holding out hope that there are others experiencing something like this, because I really don't want to have to go through re-ripping all of 4,000 non-working songs. I did, however, confirm that deleting the "corrupt" songs from my iPod and then reloading them from the iTunes library fixes the problem. In my particular case, however, since I delete most files, this is not a solution for me.

Edit: I found out this also happened to my iPod nano, which confirms the good news that this can't possibly be a hardware malfunction and that the devices themselves are just fine. It's the files inside which I now believe were corrupted by "ipoddisk" (which is a dubious program) or possibly the iTunes 8.0.2 update or even an iPod firmware update that might have caused the issue. At any rate I'm getting a backup hard drive before I attempt to download the 3500 lost songs. I'm also glad at this point that it was ONLY 3500 rather than the 20,000 I hope to have a year from now.

Oh well, I can still listen to the Clash.