My MP3's are skipping...

[RobHague]

Just listening to my mp3 collection, which was working fine if i remember correctley previously. The sound keeps going off and then back on. Like the CPU cycles are being eaten up by another program for a moment.. but i had Activity Monitor open and the CPU was hardley being used.

Whats this about? Im using iTunes 5 and i dont have many other applications open (FireFox, MSN Messenger) but it can go for a while and then suddenly 'blanks out' and then carrys on. But just now it was doing it almost every minute and was starting to become very irritating.

This is a pretty simple task to ask of any system, if its about 'priority' how do i tell OSX to give priority to iTunes?

 

[Erendiox]

OSX gives priority as it sees fit. I don't know any way to do it manually, but the thing is, music and movies that are playing always get the highest priority over other programs. You'll see everything else slow down before you see movies skip frames or music drop out. I've never heard my itunes5 skip. Maybe it was a bad instalation or something. You try a reboot or a logout? That might sort out whatevers wrong.

 

[mad jew]

That's not right. My little 800MHz iBook plays all tunes perfectly and skip free irrespective of how inundated the CPU is at the time. What bit-rate are the MP3s? Maybe try deleting the iTunes preferences, but I doubt that'll really help.

 

[Scarlet Fever]

are the MP3s ripped from CDs or downloaded from P2P programs, and do they skip in random places?

my friend downloads heaps of stuff and i noticed that it pauses all the time in the same spot every time.

 

[fash]

my itunes skip as well when the processing gets too much...maybe an ram upgrade will help?

 

[decksnap]

I've been seeing this happen lately with iTunes 5. It will cut out every few minutes for a couple seconds when I'm running a few quicktime videos and VLC.

This is on a dual 2.3 G5 with a gig of RAM.

 

[James Philp]

If the tracks are "skipping" in the place every time, then it sounds like it's the mp3, and not the CPU. It could have been from a bad import (importing without the skip protection feature on) or data corruption (either from poor P2P verification or orther data management).
I managed to corrupt my entire music library once by moving it onto a external Firewire HD. I have also experienced song corruption when retrieving tracks from an iPod - the weirdest thing about that was that both the songs on my HD and on the iPod got corrupted!

Check if it's only certain songs in certain places.