Sometimes DAB radio stations are playing music that skips like a CD, repeating a short segment like a broken record. It often goes on for quite some time, which is a bit puzzling because surely there is nothing about digital radio tech that would cause this. The skipping never happens during talk radio, only with music.

Are radio stations actually playing CDs? If yes, are these CDs also playing on autopilot with no one at the helm to quickly swap out the disc? Or is it just bad timing… the CD happened to go to shit while the DJ is literally taking a shit and away from the controls?

The skipping was extremely rare, if ever, on analog radio. So I wonder if DAB has also somehow open things up to very low budget stations with robotic DJs, perhaps due to increased sharable bandwidth or something. Switching from analog FM to DAB tripled the number of stations I can receive.

Why don’t they rip their CDs to FLAC files, then listen to the FLAC files for defects to ensure skipping never happens?