ITunes issues?

[dave2010]

Fairly recently I bought this bargain - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wagner-Great-Operas-Bayreuth-Festival/dp/B001RTYRZM

A day or two back I tried playing the last of the Ring cycle operas, and found that the end of each track gets truncated in iTunes. Is this an iTunes thing, or are the tracks from Amazon faulty in some way? Is there a fix?

I think the tracks are suppose to flow one into the next. I've heard tracks where there are unwanted gaps before (also a pain), but these tracks get truncated, then jump on to the next one.

I suppose I could check by burning the tracks to CD to see if the problem happens with a regular CD player. I have had other downloads from various suppliers without problems.

Not sure if this is the right place for this kind of query - please someone move it if not!

[Alex_UK]

Hi Dave - in itunes go to Edit -> Preferences and then click the "Playback" tab - Make sure the tick box next to "Crossfade Songs" is unchecked - if it isn't unchecked, then make sure it is - that could be the problem...

[keiths]

Hi Dave,

You'll need to 'tell' iTunes that this is a gapless album:

http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/ht/gapless_play.htm

[dave2010]

Alex

It wasn't a cross fade issue - the box wasn't ticked. Thanks for trying though.

Ketih

It may have been a gapless playback issue. Not absolutely sure as would take more testing, but before it was jumping and skipping (missing the end off) between tracks. Now I just think it might be working for albums/tracks which I edit to be gapless. Seems considerably better.

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of the relevant pages.

Slightly related - does anyone know if Squeezebox files have the same issue? Currently I'm pointing my Squeezebox at my iTunes library so that I only have to have one copy of each track on my drive. I'm not quite sure what the Squeezebox does with tracks which should follow on - it's not been too big an issue up to now, though I did try one album of linked tracks which was unlistenable to. I ended up buying the CD so I could hear them all together.

This may also be an issue with Spotify and Napster.

[keiths]

I don't know about the squeezebox - I don't have one, but it may have an issue with MP3 files as the format isn't inherently gapless (unlike FLAC etc)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback

[dave2010]

Keith

Actually I think there may be an additional issue, relating to the way iTunes sequences tracks, and the tracknames used.

The particular music comes from a 33 CD set, and looking at the tracknames I suspect that iTunes may be getting the track order wrong in some cases, causing jumps to unrelated (though often similar sounding) tracks.

I don't know how this jumbling up may have happened - on one machine at least - but if this is what has happened it's a real nuisance. Bear in mind that there may be well over 300 different tracks over the 33 CDs.

I should have a copy of the original download data somewhere, and I've got it stored on a DVD also.

Seems a bit of a mess, and pity that the original "bargain" might require quite a bit of restructuring to get to work with iTunes.

Since I've now mostly moved to Macs that's also a pain. I don't want to go back to Windows, but at least there I had a choice of players, and they probably wouldn't all get this wrong.

[webby]

Dave, have you inadvertently switched on shuffle play?

Are the tracks named and numbered correctly? Can you tell/see that they are out of order?

[webby]

Dave, you have the mp3 version right? I just checked your link and there is a user there who also has a problem with the mp3s. See here http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B00159679S/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt_sr_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addOneStar

Maybe have a word with amazon?

[lovejoy]

Hi Dave,
Which version of iTunes are you running? I've had a few versions in the past where Apple have managed to break playback in some way. I know that going back a few versions ago, I had exactly the symptoms you describe, albeit with only certain tracks which was down to the version of CODEC that had been used in the way the tracks were encoded. If the stuff you're having trouble with is lossless then there's no harm in expanding them to WAV and/or recompressing them using the built in iTunes ALAC compressor, but if it's already MP3 then recompressing to MP3 is going to incur losses again, and converting MP3 to ALAC seems like a waste of space - but might be worth a try.

As for the Squeezebox, it depends on how you have your server set up. If you've clicked 'Use iTunes' for playback then the chances are you'll get exactly the same problem. Unticking this will use Squeezebox Server for playback so this should work fine.