Determining Gapless Playback Information

There is a major flaw in the programming here. I have the same issue with files determining gapless playback everytime itunes starts, and everytime it syncs with my iphone. Itunes is too stupid to remember the gapless playback information it determined. This only happens with some files, for me it is also recordings. Maybe because they have too much space in them? or something to do with how they were encoded? It's really annoying, particularly since it wastes so much time and the gapless feature is utterly useless to me. How can we get this fixed or a resolution?

Okay Seriously Apple what is the deal? You guys have dropped the ball on iTunes for last few years. I used to love this program now it just blows. You have no feature for it to automatically search and correct directories for songs if they are moved to an external Hard Drive (btw the Old XP version of Windows Media Player could do this and as someone who works with programers it wouldn't be that hard for you guys to put this function in the current iTunes) and now we have to constantly deal with this crap. I thankfully hadn't had this problem till most recently, but it is annoying that iTunes (a complete memory hog) can't remember that it's already checked for gapless playback. I recently received the soundtrack trilogy to God of War and it checks for gapless every freaking time. In fact the option to turn this off in the Album info, literally means nothing at this point so why the heck is it even an option to do so. Come on Apple do your job. Stop focusing on how you can make your commercials look good and focus on what made you good. Your interface and programing. Hello, are we talking to ourselves here?

Message was edited by: SS3

Message was edited by: SS3

It is weird that some people have problems with this and others (perhaps most) do not. Perhaps there is something funny (different) about the files that you just added that itunes does not like. What format are the files? Where did they come from? Maybe there is someway to change them so that itunes will not keep rechecking them. I was so happy when apple finally gave itunes gapless playback - the annoying ticks between songs was finally gone. I notice iTunes will recheck sometimes when you upgrade versions, or computers, you have to let this finish otherwise it will just start over. There is probably a flag somewhere that tells itunes it has done it - sorry I do not know where that flag is, if I did perhaps I could tell you how to set it.

And, Yes we are talking to ourselves. Apple does not officially monitor these discussions. A shame perhaps, but understandable since it is free and they are in business to make money. I'd rather have a free forum than none, or one you had to pay for. If you are under applecare, or warrentee, you can escalate through official channels - sorry I don't have the links handy but they are available someplace around here.

I'll say what I said in the thread I started about this problem that Apple for some reason refuses to address.

The only options at the moment are unfortunately, other programs. Luckily, there are actually viable options.

If you have less than 10,000 songs I suggest Songbird ( http://www.getsongbird.com/) It's full of features and have a nice GUI.

If you have more than 10,000 songs, and if you are reading this post I suspect you do, Media Monkey is your ticket. ( http://www.mediamonkey.com/) Media Monkey is designed to handle large libraries and out classes iTunes and Songbird in features. Only drawback is it's for Windows only. I suggest you don't use with Parallels because a large library will inevitably be CPU and memory intensive. My setup is Windows 7 20 gig partition that only runs iTunes (though I used XP before and it worked fine)

Media Monkey as convenient as iTunes but AT LEAST IT WORKS. All metadata is carried over.

To those saying this isn't a problem for them, the issue is with large libraries. If you have over 40k songs, determining gapless audio might literally take over a month, if it doesn't get hung up first.

This is unacceptable.

If enough people stop using this now useless program, Apple might actually take notice because apparently these forums are the official place to yell at a brick wall.

Just to add another wrinkle to this conversation: I never had this problem before, but upgraded to 9.1 yesterday and now after it's done syncing my iPhone, I get the "Determining Gapless Playback Information" update for 2,638 songs. My iPhone has about 4k songs on it, and my entire iTunes library has about 10k songs. I did turn on that the new, cool, 9.1 feature to reduce bit rate of my iPhone's music to 128 bits. I'd turn it back off to see if the problem persists, but it took a couple of hours for my PC to do the first iTunes 9.1 sync with the new 128 bit feature, so I hesitate to revert, only to switch it back on again...

If you really want Apple to hear you, talk to Apple here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Apple doesn't read these forums.

Tracy

I have the same problem on about 7 songs every time I open iTunes. How do I fix it?

Has there been a fix for this issue?

I'm bummed! I just bought the new 17" core i7 yesterday with the 750gig HDD stock. I've finally got a backup Mac that I'm happy with the bring to our events. We make our mortgage doing sound and video production...and our library now exceeds 105,000 songs....nearly 1.2TB. It's a large library, but we've been successful running it primarily on iMacs in the field...initially the Core2Duo machines...most recently we picked up a couple i3s this past fall....all with internal 2tb drives (installed post purchase obviously). Our full library resides on each iMac with a TimeMachine backup of the library on hand at all shows. We've never had an issue (knock on wood...) with the iMacs going down...but it is Prom season in a month or so and I want real back up this summer for weddings. So, I'm testing partial "on board" libraries and Full libraries on an external HDD.

Today, I added the music to the new MBP. SWEET machine, BTW:) Another thread though! Took about 9 hours total...now it's going through this "Gapless" BS. Never seen it til today. I've got 11 iMacs (all business/event machines), a Mac Pro at home as the MotherShip for our business, which includes all of our video gear...and several laptops...which as I mentioned, we are now testing as our backups so we can completely rid ourselves of CDs on site (right now, our redundancy measure in case I have computer issues). After reading through this thread, I'm ready to return this $2500 machine. I'm a Mac addict! BUT...no matter how sweet this machine is, I HAVE to have it working on site! It can't do this. As mentioned....it locks up! Even with a quad core i7 and 4 gigs of RAM....the SOB just beach balls constantly while it's "Analyzing". Has anyone come up with a fix yet? Namely Apple....or is this an external HDD issue? Because there's no way to have my entire library internally...which is fine, and would facilitate some discipline on my end to go through the library and painstakingly remove doubles and low bit rate copies. But, I'm lazy:) I want iTunes to do all the work....and as cheap as storage is these days, I don't mind having it all. It's amazing to me, though...how much quicker my 3rd party programs are to access my music....DJay for Mac utilizing the iTunes library directly...as well as Traktor and Serato. They just fly! Regardless of library size. I'd love to see the same for iTunes...during long periods of background music, library management and playlist building, and simplicity of use (to rent out gear and provide a playable playlist for non technical folk!). I need a fix!

Is this TRULY something that happens to you guys EVERY time you update the library? IE, add a new album? I'm updating my library, sometimes daily...but always weekly. I'm also doing events half the time that we are ripping the music in to the systems (Cheerleading events, for example with their "Routine" music) on site, during "Show Time!". This Can absolutely NOT happen in that situation. Again, this is a backup rig...so it won't get a ton of use as a primary source at events. So I'm looking for no surprises.

I'm a bit baffled though...this is an old thread, and it's been responded to very sparsely over the past couple years...it seems isolated. Is there a simple button I accidentally hit? I thought I new iTunes in and out, but this is an absolute first.

BTW...The one nice thing about this new MBP (the new Sandy Bridge procs), I'm not going to be waiting a month...it's decided to analyze 89,,213...not all 106,644! It began analyzing for gapless playback at about 6pm and it's now 10:50pm....it's at 41,050 at this point...so it should be done by morning, then it's time for the "Album Art". Think I'm going to turn that off:)

Thanks for any guidance!

Jer

Will there ever be a definitive answer to this seemingly common problem ?
As soon as I'd imported my music library (12000 tracks) ITunes started analysing gapless playback status for all the tracks. At 30-40 seconds per track this took well over 2 days ! And then when I looked at the ITunes music library two thirds of the music wasn't even listed.
Anyway, to cut a long story short with trying other means to sort things out, I uninstalled ITunes completely, downloaded the latest version (10.2) and then re imported the music library. Yes, it started the gapless analysing again but this time it is taking 6-7 seconds per track on average (why should the time it takes to check a track vary - surely it's just looking for a tag setting and that's independent of the length of the track). So will still take many hours but at least )I hope) it will finish. I think then it may well start to check album art but I'll wait to see what happens.
I hope it will sort itself out once it has finished analysing and that it doesn't do this again (apart from when new tracks are added) but I'm not feeling that confident.

Hi Liffy
Mine is complete....gapless, album art (you can shut this off if in recall correctly).... As well, all music is in. Now I'm going to attempt to add music, from iTunes to a cd....I'm going to see what happens. Either A, most folks don't have libraries this large, B...it's happening when an external HDD is used for iTunes storage...or C, it's only upon initial import of a main library to a new machine....which is my hope. But again, of all our Macs, this is the frost time I've seen this happen...however...it's also the first time we've attempted to use an external drive for the main library. I'm going to call Apple today, see if I can find out any more info.

Is there any other iTunes-like organizers that will sync as beautifully as iTunes itself with iOS devices?

J

akdj, please post the outcome of your discussions with Apple. I have exactly the same problems and am ready to abandon iTunes in favor of another program. My music collection, which is stored on an external hard drive and connected to my Time Capsule, is rendered useless by iTunes. Every time I start the program it initiates the "determining gapless playback information" and this last for hours. Unusually, every track I have originates from a (purchased) CD and I have never downloaded a single song. I am a die hard Mac fan, but not having access to my music is simply not an option.

akdj, I have abandoned iTunes and I am trying Songbird. So far so good. The interface is very similar to iTunes and the software seems far more stable. As it said in some reviews I read "If Firefox and iTunes were to have offspring, this is what they would look like". I am not sure whether the functionality will be intricate enough for your needs, but it is well worth a look. I can listen to my music whenever I want, which is a significant improvement!

I did locate a solution to this problem... first however, you have to get the gapless thing to stop. I used get itunes metadata script and it stopped. I didn''t know it would. Or at least it enabled be to use the x to stop it.

Select all in library, get info, options and where it says gapless album make sure it says no on everything. That will run for awhile and then no more gapless playback issues. At least it worked for me on intel imac 10.4.11.

shanti,
bobbie

"Determining Gapless Playback Information"
*Lockups & Lengthly Process that makes it hard for those of us with huge collections of multimedia and/or not-so-capable computers.
Here's my personal Temporary Solutions thus far:
*THIS FIRST SOLUTION IS FOR THOSE WITH A FAST ENOUGH COMPUTER & DONT MIND DOING IT ALL THE TIME *
(1) A: Look at the top display and look for an "X" or 'close' icon
B: Mash on that icon until the process discontinues and no longer shows.
*U must b rather quick to catch it, as once the process continues past a certain point, you must use the Task Manager to kill the iTunes process *
*ON THIS SECOND SOLUTION: Make sure you are displaying 'hidden' properties in the default AND imported folders you have added to iTunes *
(2) A: Look for any files ".iTunes preferences" which usually looks like a considerably small file from 305 bytes / 4.0 kilobytes (on disk).
B: Delete this file, as it is an annotation made by iTunes preferences and location settings as close as i can determine (yet cannot confirm as the source containing the command initiating gapless playback information managment.
**This second solution was done through trial and error, as i had a past experience dealing certain annotations made by Media players like iTunes, Winamp, Windows Media Players always doing SOME* sort of scan on 'large' ammounts of stored content that get 'hung-up' due to THAT type of annotation being corrupted. **
***THIS HAS YET TO BE CONFIRMED/REPLIED TO ME BY EMAILS I HAVE SENT TO CRASH-ISSUE SUBMITS I HAVE SENT *