Local mp3s on iTunes for Mac skip at exactly three minutes

[haze00]

Hello,

I’ve had a frustrating problem with my iTunes library for almost a year now. Some of my tracks, all locally stored mp3s from a variety of sources, will play until exactly the 3-minute mark and then skip to the next song without playing the rest of the track. It affects about 20% of my library of 20,000 songs, and only affects songs which were imported in the last couple of years. I’ve noticed that when the skipping problem affects one song on an album, all the songs on the album will also be affected.

I am pretty sure the problem is that my itunes library file (.itl) is corrupted, because the mp3s themselves work fine when I play them through other programs. I have attempted various solutions, including checking that there is not a start/end time set in the song options, and rebuilding my library as detailed here, but these have not fixed the problem. I also tried simply deleting the files from my library and re-importing them, and while that fixes the problem occasionally, it is not reliable and new songs I add to my library continue to skip. I have tried many other solutions listed in various online forums, including these two, and nothing has worked so far.

I went to the Apple store and asked what I could do, and was told I would have to delete my iTunes library and create a new library, importing all my mp3s again. This is not a good solution for me, partly because I want to keep my metadata if at all possible (I navigate my large library using the ‘date added’ field), but mostly because my iTunes is organised around dozens of big playlists that I use to navigate my music collection — I work as a DJ and music writer so this is important to me.

I’m desperate to find out if there is any way to fix this problem without having to start rebuilding my playlists from scratch, which would be an enormously laborious process. Does anyone have any ideas that might be able to help me?

Another thought I had was that perhaps I can export each playlist as a text file and then start a new iTunes library and import my mp3s, if there were some way to automate recreating all my playlists from the text files instead of me having to drag around thousands of songs.

I’d really appreciate any thoughts or advice.

 

[KaliYoni]

If you use Time Machine to backup your Mac, you might be able to find a version of your library file that is uncorrupted.

Then, assuming you've dug up a library file you want to test, (you might already know this process) create a new folder on your Desktop. Move the current version of the file to the folder and change the name of the file slightly. For example, change it from "MyTunes.itl" to "MyTunes_now.itl". Next, put the Time Machine version of the file in the location the current version came from. You might be able to just hit the "Restore" button in Time Machine to do this.

Now see if your problem is fixed. If not or if iTunes starts behaving in a strange way, move the Time Machine version to the Trash. Empty the Trash. Restore the original name of the current version. Put the current version back where it came from.

 

[haze00]

Thanks for your response KaliYoni, sorry for the delay - it took me a while to have time to dig through my Time Machine backups and find the correct files.

I tried this fix - just moving an old library file from backup into the new folder didn't work, so instead I tried deleting all my music and restoring the entire Music folder from a Time Machine backup from back when everything was working fine (first I made copies of all the music I have downloaded in the meantime, so that I can reimport them into the functioning library later).

At first the new library wouldn't play any tracks (perhaps because the original library file was from iTunes, and I have since upgraded to Catalina so now am using the Music app), but I opened Music with the option key and directed it to open the old iTunes library file, and it now seems to be working okay. I will try to import all the new music from the past year now and see if my problem recurs — fingers crossed that it's fixed now! Will report back.

 

[haze00]

Hello,

I've got an update on this - it seemed like the solution you suggested worked. I found an old version of the itunes playlist file on a backup and restored that version, then copied across all the mp3s that I had added in the intervening year, and spent a few weeks putting them back into their correct playlists. It seemed like I had finally found a solution to my problems! None of the songs in my library were skipping anymore.

However, I just bought a big batch of new music and imported the tracks into my library, and I was disappointed to see that the problem has started again on the new tracks - this time they are all skipping at exactly 3 minutes 32 seconds. It's very disappointing because I really thought I'd fixed the problem! Does anyone have any idea why this might be or how I might be able to fix it once and for all?

EDIT - It just got stranger. So the tracks that I noticed were skipping again were ones I imported yesterday. However today I imported a few more, just to check if the problem recurred, and it didn't. So all the tracks I added today worked fine, and all the ones from yesterday skip at exactly 3.32. I am importing them in exactly the same way, dragging them from a folder directly into an Apple Music playlist. Any thoughts? It's very strange.

 

[corryzahn]

EDIT - It just got stranger. So the tracks that I noticed were skipping again were ones I imported yesterday. However today I imported a few more, just to check if the problem recurred, and it didn't. So all the tracks I added today worked fine, and all the ones from yesterday skip at exactly 3.32. I am importing them in exactly the same way, dragging them from a folder directly into an Apple Music playlist. Any thoughts? It's very strange.

So, I'm having the EXACT same issue. 3:32 songs will skip to the end. It's not everything I import, but if it happens to one song, it happens to all in the same import (usually done by album). Doesn't matter if it's something I bought somewhere else or if it's a CD I imported.

Here's another interesting piece of information... I use iTunes match, so my library is available across all my devices. If a song skips on the computer, it does NOT skip when I play it on my iPhone or iPad. This is true of both tracks that are matched and tracks that are uploaded.

I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the size of the library. Every post that I've read concerning this is usually from someone with a rather large library (81,470 tracks in my library).

It's frustrating the hell out of me. I've tried everything, and while it does seem to fix the issue with what's currently in my library, it doesn't stop it from happening again, later.

 

[HeroOfTime32]

It’s an issue I believe with Music “determining gapless playback”. The only solution I know of is to delete the “broken” songs from your library and reimport them.

I had this happen to me to. Thankfully only at the 00:21 mark so it was easy to find quickly. Also, to stop this from happening again…you need to add the songs to Apple Music “slowly”. What I mean is don’t drag and drop 100+ songs at a time. To be extra safe I manually added one song at a time and waited for the info banner at the bottom to finish the “determining gapless playback” workflow before adding the next. It’s a pain…and if not caught early, can totally ruin your music library. It started for me about 1-2 years ago. Thankfully only had about 50-75 songs that were affected.

Apple Music is becoming a buggier mess with every iteration.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Is this all on mp3s? If so, what if you ripped to AAC?

 

[HeroOfTime32]

Is this all on mp3s? If so, what if you ripped to AAC?

For me, it was file type agnostic. A mix between mp3 and alac.

 

[dysamoria]

I just started experiencing this. At first I thought it was Mac OS audio system problems, but this machine should have plenty of CPU to spare, especially if I'm just letting it play music and otherwise be passive. When I sat down to pay attention to the issue, and when I read this thread, I do think it looks like it's related to gapless playback calculation, because one of the song transitions ended up having a click/dropout, which is not something I've ever experienced with iTunes before (unless you start a track under 10 seconds left)... and here I am with their "upgraded" version renamed Music, which is supposed to be "better", and yet my tracks are skipping and it's REALLY IRRITATING.

I'm SO SICK OF APPLE'S SOFTWARE FLAWS.

Has anyone found that this problem goes away after running through the songs repeatedly? I restarted the playlist I was listening to and it has not reoccurred up to where I had already played [EDIT, sure enough, the next track, where I had not gotten to yet, did it at the last 10 seconds, while it had not happened at all to any of the prior tracks that I restarted in this playlist].

If this does not self-resolve, are there solutions that do NOT involve completely rebuilding a music library (I mean, FFS, JFC, "start over again" is the stupidest NON-solution to tech issues you could ever instruct a customer to do- and yeah, that's not just Apple, it's the WHOLE computer industry, which is a DISASTER of ENDLESS ISSUES, and our society TREATS THIS LIKE IT'S NORMAL).

Details: I bought a newer used iMac (18,3) to replace my 2011 iMac (12,2) that can't be updated anymore. It had High Sierra, and of course iTunes, not the Music app. I'm enjoying the Retina display, but it seems I'm getting to experience a bunch of new bugs I've never stumbled upon before with this newer version of Mac OS (after migrating my data to the new machine, I upgraded to Monterrey). Today I'm listening to my Music library while doing cabling chores and the skipping is driving me nuts.

While I'm here talking about Apple's stupidity, searching the Internet for info on things is REALLY HARD when companies decide to rename their products and companies to GENERIC TERMS, like "Propellerhead" -> "Reason Studios" and "Apple iTunes" -> "Apple Music", which is even worse because the search results are almost nothing but Apple's streaming service!!

 

[zachiedoo]

So my $.02 on this issue. I listen to my music almost exclusively on my iPod touch gen 7, about a year old. It's running iOS 15.7.3, which is the current version as iPods are not able to run iOS 16. This problem started happening to me a few months ago. It's very sporadic, so I was never able to notice if it was happening at the same point in all the songs, and I don't remember which songs it was so I can't check if it's only a certain format, but I'm almost certain one of them was a song purchased from the iTunes Store. Two weeks ago, it happened to two songs in a row, and hasn't happened since. I was able to listen to one of the songs on my MBP right after, and it played all the way through. Other than updating it to 15.7.3 a couple weeks after it was released, I haven't made any changes to it or synced it.

The next time it happens, I'll pay more attention...