I am old school and don’t stream. I have all my music downloaded on my home pc, which I then copied to my Android. I have plenty of storage space, but recently many of my songs are “glitching” when playing—either cutting out, doing the “record scratch” or parts getting “pixelated.”
Anyone know what is going on and how to fix this? Should I just nuke my music folder and transfer everything back over from the PC?
Is it always the same songs at the same spot? If so, copy one (or a few) of them over again and then try again. If that fixes it, then you know.
Oh and by the way: make sure you have more than one copy of your music files on reliable storage media… This doesn’t include mobile devices, USB thumb drives, SD cards or writable CDs/DVDs and the like.
I seem to remember that I had a similar issue, but I don’t remember how I fixed it (or even if I managed to fix it) 
Did you try finding a solution online?
Here’s just some links about similar problems that might give a hint on how to fix it:
Could be linked to cache or battery use.
Seems like you still have “clean” copies of your music on the PC. I’d do various versions of turn it off and back on again:
1a. Delete all your android music, replace with clean copy from PC and see if that works. If not…
1b. If your music is on removable storage on your android like micro-xd - try a new card with clean music. If not…
2. Delete your media player app, and re-install or replace with something else and check results on a fresh copy of music, if that doesn’t work…
3. Do a factory reset of the android device ensuring most recent version of android supported by your device, copy clean music and check again (if you have an up-to-date-ish version of android a factory reset isn’t that big a deal anymore if your photos are in google photos or similar - all your settings remain - biggest PITA is logging into all your apps again)
4. If clean files and software didn’t solve it - you’re looking at a hardware issue. If your android is more than a few years old, its probably easiest to replace it. You don’t need to get sucked into the “latest flagship” device game if you don’t want. If you don’t do mobile gaming or high end video/photos with your phone - using Samsung as an example, you don’t need that $1k Galaxy S21 because an A14 will do everything you need for $200.
How old is your phone? I remember reading that flash storage (which is what phones and other “SSD” drives like USB sticks have) can go bad after a number of years. I’d recon above 6-8 years.
That doesn’t mean that your phone or storage card has to go bad, I’ve used a PC ssd drive for almost ten years, no problems. However, I had a stick that went bad after two or three years. Manufacturers usually account for this by having extra storage space that gets swapped out for corrupted sectors.
HTH
Cheers
Antonio
That’s all true; however it’s tied to read/write cycles and patterns, not age. Most people utilize fairly little of their storage so it’s not a factor. I have a couple SSD’s pushing five years old now that are still really healthy in terms of bad sectors.