Apple Music (old iTunes) is cutting off ends of songs

[droplink]

Hi folks!

For some reason, Apple Music app is cutting off the ends of some songs.
These are imported tracks, not bought via Apple Music the service and in mp3 format.

Is there anyway to stop this from happening?
Some of the suggestions on the official Apple forum is to rebuild the Library. Yeah sure, I am going to rebuild all of my playlists and everything (not really a good suggestion)

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Are you sure the songs in question have ends? Have you tried playing them in something else to be sure they are not truncated?

You might drag the problematic ones onto the desktop, open in Quicktime and listen to the end (to be sure they have ends). If so, save as, audio only and then import the new AAC file into Music to replace them. Then listen for the ends again.

Be careful about skipping to the end to hear that there is an end... as the problem may be file corruption at some point BEFORE where you might land within the song. Best option is to just let it play all the way to the end.

If you ripped the songs from CD with Music, this would be a surprise. If you got these songs from internet places, perhaps there's some corruption in the encoding? The Quicktime test will likely show that it is NOT Music (app). But if they play fine in QT, the export as audio will give you a file type Apple favors, which should then play fine in Music (app). Drop them back in as AAC files and they should be fine going forward.

 

[arw]

An additional thought in regard to your playlists in case you have verified the files themselves are actually intact:
I understand you curated your playlists manually and not via 'smart' conditions?
You can still resort to the following:
For each of your playlists, click on one of them and then in the menu bar select:
File > Library > Export Playlist... > [M3U8]
Now when you purge your library or experiment with a new one, you can add all of your previous playlists by simply opening those .m3u8 files in iTunes.
Obviously you lose all previous "added dates" and "play counts". But if you actually want to pursue this, I can create/provide an Apple Script to export the play counts as well.

 

[droplink]

Maybe don’t release the same product over and over and over again…

Are you sure the songs in question have ends? Have you tried playing them in something else to be sure they are not truncated?

You might drag the problematic ones onto the desktop, open in Quicktime and listen to the end (to be sure they have ends). If so, save as, audio only and then import the new AAC file into Music to replace them. Then listen for the ends again.

Be careful about skipping to the end to hear that there is an end... as the problem may be file corruption at some point BEFORE where you might land within the song. Best option is to just let it play all the way to the end.

If you ripped the songs from CD with Music, this would be a surprise. If you got these songs from internet places, perhaps there's some corruption in the encoding? The Quicktime test will likely show that it is NOT Music (app). But if they play fine in QT, the export as audio will give you a file type Apple favors, which should then play fine in Music (app). Drop them back in as AAC files and they should be fine going forward.

Thanks, yes if I manually move the cursor to someplace near the end of the song (the part that is normally skipped) then the app plays that part. All the way to the fade out of the song. So the files are not corrupt as such. The advice of trying to recreate the files is interesting, I can try that.

An additional thought in regard to your playlists in case you have verified the files themselves are actually intact:
I understand you curated your playlists manually and not via 'smart' conditions?
You can still resort to the following:
For each of your playlists, click on one of them and then in the menu bar select:
File > Library > Export Playlist... > [M3U8]
Now when you purge your library or experiment with a new one, you can add all of your previous playlists by simply opening those .m3u8 files in iTunes.
Obviously you lose all previous "added dates" and "play counts". But if you actually want to pursue this, I can create/provide an Apple Script to export the play counts as well.

Sadly, the problem appears even when the files are not inside playlists - even if I use the general navigation the songs are cut off.

 

[arw]

Sadly, the problem appears even when the files are not inside playlists - even if I use the general navigation the songs are cut off.

Apparently I didn't express myself correctly. Yes, that behaviour is to be expected (had it happen to me in the past as well).
You do have to remove all media and re-import it. Or at least the songs added last that are cut off.
My post was merely pointing out a way how to preserve your precious playlists.

 

[droplink]

Apparently I didn't express myself correctly. Yes, that behaviour is to be expected (had it happen to me in the past as well).
You do have to remove all media and re-import it. Or at least the songs added last that are cut off.
My post was merely pointing out a way how to preserve your precious playlists.

Ahh, I see thanks for advice
If needs be, I will export them and reimport them.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Thanks, yes if I manually move the cursor to someplace near the end of the song (the part that is normally skipped) then the app plays that part. All the way to the fade out of the song. So the files are not corrupt as such. The advice of trying to recreate the files is interesting, I can try that.

Since they have playable "ends," my first guess is an encoding "bug" at some point in the song. I've experienced this myself before, even with rips from CDs. Think of playback like a train running down a track. If one bit of track is broken, the train will derail. If it could jump over that point- as you are doing when you skip ahead- the remaining track is just fine.

So I think your music file sources have a spot of damage in them or were encoded with something that Apple's "reader" just doesn't like and can't process. It MIGHT work to drag them onto desktop, open in Quicktime, export as AAC file because that MIGHT "repair" the bad spot.

But my guess is that if this is the problem, Quicktime will not play them to the end either. If so, maybe try the free Audacity or other sound editor to see if it can "read" the file to the end and play it back within the editor. If so, export it from editor as AAC (or .wav to then convert to AAC within Apple Music).

Else, if NOTHING can resolve the damaged point in the "track", the file source itself is bad and you should seek out the songs from some other source. You would be far from the first to find poorly-encoded music and/or music with damaged bits in them.

 

[Le Big Mac]

Assume you don't have the songs set to end "early" (info-->options-->stop [time into song]?

 

[droplink]

So, i have an update.
Thanks for the help lads.

I was able to use XLD to convert the songs from mp3 to mp4 (or m4a, really) and reimport them into iTunes.
That worked! So it was as said a bug in the encoding that caused the skip and recoding the tracks overrode that.

 

[arw]

I was able to use XLD to convert the songs from mp3 to mp4 (or m4a, really)

Glad you found a solution.
But as a lossy-to-lossy conversion (mp3 to aac) always results in inferior quality and should be avoided, I'd like to suggest a different approach:
If you have access to a Windows PC or can run a VM, you could give foobar2000's "Rebuild MP3 Stream" feature a try which attempts a (lossless) repair. Simply drag all mp3s in question into foobar2000, select all and click right to see the menu item.

Remove and re-add the mp3 files to iTunes.

Download foobar2000

foobar2000

www.foobar2000.org

Although it's not free and does not support batch processing, 'Fission' for macOS is capable of pretty much the same. At least from my experience.

Fission - Fast & lossless audio editing for Mac

Fission makes audio editing fast and easy enough for anyone.

www.rogueamoeba.com