Well, the only useful test is going to be: do they play?
I suspect that your iTunes held a mixture of .mp3 and other (.m4a, .aac, whatever) files. The real mp3s played on the Fuze; the others didn’t. When iTunes thinks it is copying a file you already have, it adds the digit (as in Cherish1) to the copy of the file. Which is why I would have expected cherish1.mp3 to be an exact copy of cherish.mp3.
But if it’s not…well, it’s not.
The Create mp3 versions should play on the Fuze, regardless. If not, come back here and we’ll try some other tricks.
I’m a little old-school about computers. I like to see what’s going on. For convenience, modern computers tend to hide a lot of things from the user–like what kind of files you are playing, where they are stored, etc. When everything “just works,” that’s fine. You buy from iTunes Music Store, play on iTunes, transfer to iPod, all compatible. But when it doesn’t just work, then you end up digging a little extra to find out what the heck is going on.
If you’re at all curious about this, and have a Windows computer, there’s a cute little freeware geek program called the Gspot Codec Appliance that analyzes your files. Tells you what codec and a lot of other stuff.
You could use it to compare cherish.mp3 and cherish1.mp3 (There’s probably a similar program for Apple, but I don’t know what it is.) But an easier comparison would be just to see what the two file sizes are. If they’re different, then they are probably different codecs. If they’re the same, and one plays and one doesn’t, then you have a puzzle.
