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Since I've upgraded to iTunes 9 certain songs play ok but other songs skip during play.

I tried downgrading to iTunes 8 but to no avail.

I've tried other music players and some have the same problem and some don't so I think the problem is not with iTunes but with the music api.

Any ideas? Thanks.

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  • Is it many songs? It could be that the music files have become corrupted if say you just downloaded them or moved them from a different drive, maybe they didn't get moved properly and so the files may skip as part of them is missing.
    – lavamunky
    May 23, 2010 at 9:08

2 Answers 2

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For what it's worth, I once had skipping issues on relatively slow hardware, but the problem appeared only in iTunes, and not in any other media player.

This was a Windows platform, but the software scheme is likely similar.

The issue was caused by the confluence of three conditions:

  1. a large audio library
  2. slower hardware (i.e. Pentium 4/XP run-of-the-mill consumer rig), and
  3. iTunes being the media player.

Apparently, for reasons not understood by me, iTunes uses an XML file as a major component of management of the whole library. iTunes updates the database at the conclusion of every recordable event, such as a change in ID3 metadata, or even, the playing to the track, whereupon iTunes notes this in the Play Count, and immediately updates that XML file.

Well, that's all good and fine for the average music library. Mine happened to be about 125GB at the time, however, and the library's size caused that database XML file to blow up to about 48MB.

So, each time a track finished playing, the PC was not only trying to crank up the next track, but also read/write a 48MB xml file, which is ridiculously massive in size and lengthy in time to rewrite. Maybe this helps.

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The only time I've found iTunes "skipping" is when my computer was under intense CPU load, like running Photoshop while rendering in Maya while playing music with a visualizer.

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  • I'm seeing it under low cpu load. It's repeatable - the same songs skip the same way. I first suspected the mp3s were corrupted, but they play correctly in some other players.
    – thethinman
    Oct 26, 2009 at 16:03
  • What about memory usage?
    – Josh
    Oct 28, 2009 at 16:04
  • Free memory available
    – thethinman
    Jan 3, 2010 at 20:01

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