I had exactly what you describe in the very beginning (Release 0.5 about a year or so ago) when I was synching over serial, ie. good source files that played cleanly on the PC and then glitched/fizzed/popped/splatted/garbled on playback on the empeg. The clue was the repeatability on specific tracks, not randomness.

What was happening was that during the download of sequential blocks of data, the odd block was dropped, and never re-tried. This left "holes" in the downloads, which the decoder interpreted as a "Splat" (technical term)

Mike fixed it with several small iterations of the download protocol (which were also applied to USB) which made it more robust.

I would think it would be worth the effort to report it - but it will be difficult to track as a bug. Your "delete and download again" workaround looks to be the only current solution.

Mail it to bugs.

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015