Sound Quality All of a Sudden Poor

I was having the same problem with both iTunes & Quicktime. Scratchy, muffled music across all tracks (didn't matter what the file format was). The same audio file worked great in WMA & RealPlayer.

I called Apple Support, and we went through some troubleshooting. We trashed the preference file for Quicktime, which feeds both Quicktime & iTunes playback, and that fixed the sound quality. So, go to user>library>preferences and trash the file named "com.apple.quicktimeplayer.plist" then empty the trash. Log out or restart, and open either iTunes or Quicktime to regenerate that file. Hopefully, that fixes the sound quality problem. In my case, it was the result of a corrupted preference file that was affecting my user id.

Hope this helps!

Hey mate,

I discovered the exact same thing after the iTunes 7.6 (29) update from a few days ago. It is REALLY iTunes, because (I use Leopard) when I open the .mp3's with quickview, the sound is amazingly better than when played through iTunes. I've tried every bluddy setting on the iTunes equalizer (but basically, when not using the equalizer or putting it to "flat" preset, this should in theory produce the same sound as the quickview player) but nothing helped.
I'm sending a mail to Apple, because the sound is just horrible.

Cheers,
Djenski.

Same happening here with Itunes' latest version and Windows Vista. Sound quality is extremely poor, and it seems weird but it is the right speaker the one that sounds worse. Winamp or WMP are not giving any problem.

We are having the same problem. We can plat music for 10- 15 minutes then the sound just goes bad. It cracks and slows down. I thought it was just my computer but it seems that the problem is a little bigger than that. I hope that Apple puts a fix out there soon.

Does this work PC's as well as Mac's? I've had this issue since upgrading to 7.6 as well as the temporary freezing every 15 minutes. If I close out iTunes and reopen, playing the same song works fine. However, after 15 minutes (or less) it reverts back to the scratchy crackly sound.

I've tried re-installing quicktimes and iTunes numerous times to no avail. If you re-install does it remove this prefernce file, or is this something that stays behind after an uninstall?

I don't know about how PC's handle preferences, but if it is happening on PC's too, it is probably the same bug within Quicktime.

The way I discovered it was by testing an audio file in iTunes, Quicktime, and another program like RealPlayer. I noticed that iTunes & Quicktime had problems (along with another piece of software, VLC), but RealPlayer was playing the track with perfect clarity.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about PC's to guide you through handling this issue. And FYI, I'm still having the problem every few days, but at least I know how to fix it now... Hopefully, Apple will deal with it in their next Quicktime update...

WOW. iTunes just keeps sucking more and more.