Determining Gapless Playback Information

Yup - worked for me. Shouldn't have to do this, of course, but a great way of stopping this ridiculous procedure.

Pleeeese Apple fix this soon - thanks!

That had been winding me up for months and now its solved so easily - thank you,

ie: hit the 'x' in the itunes progress bar

It would be fine if iTunes determined gapless playback ONCE, for each album. The flaw is that it repeats the process over and over again. Talk about redundancy...

In a continuing effort to beat this problem I tackled this issue with codepoit's suggestion referring to Michael Smith3.

I know for a fact (I'm on 10.8) that my solution works for me and a few others. However, adding tracks one at a time is a nuisance. To check the above solution, I used the "Add to Library" feature from the file menu to add a new 2CD album. When I closed and re-opened iTunes, it obviously went on determining gapless playback. I selected the entire album and checked the box "yes" for gapless album under "Get Info." When I reopened iTunes, it did not attempt to "determine..." I selected the album again and checked "No" for gapless album under "Get Info." I have closed and reopened iTunes like 10 times. It is still NOT "Determining Gapless Playback." Make sure that after you select "Gapless Playback" for an album that you close and reopen iTunes to allow to determine if needed before you change it back to "No."

So, for those of you with large libraries, use the "Command" button to select multiple albums in your library browser (select like ten or twenty albums that you know are affected, as a starting point). Select all the songs in the list and go through the above process and see what you get. Good Luck

I had the same problem and check on what song it was choking, removed the files and let iTunes go. It my case the file was causing the gapless to freeze. I repeated this to all the files it was stuck on and now everything works find.

For thos who are still wondering what gapless is doing, it's removing any electronic gap you may have between song so you have the impression it's one single tracks. This was used on Pink Floyd The Wall album.

bumping this thread. does anyone know if updating to the new itunes 11 resolves this problem?

It does not..... bummer.....

im having similar issues as those described in this thread. itunes cycles through "determining gapless playback information" for the same songs, every time it's opened. any new tracks that have been added to itunes since the problem started, are added to the "gapless playback" cycle (so the list keeps on growing).

i've tried deleting and re-importing some of the offending tracks (both as single files and as folders), without improvement. i've checked the files with mp3val and they aren't corrupted. so i'm considering deleting and re-installing itunes to fix the problem once and for all, but here is my question: i don't want to lose all my ratings, playlists, etc., so i would be replacing the new music/itunes folder once i re-install itunes. my question is does this re-introduce the "gapless playback" problem into the new version of itunes??

Well, to answer your question...in my experience I did what you are proposing to do as per above about a year ago with the guy in the Apple Store. It took ages to do but the guy was very good. All was fine but after I'd added about another twenty tracks from various sources the problem returned. I still get the same problem with about 166 tracks now but, thankfully, not my whole playlist. It also seems that the latest version of iTunes still hasn't fixed it. Hope this hepls a little.

Pleeeeeese Apple - fix this sometime soon - it's really annoying! Many thanks in advance.

anyone else tried to do a re-install as a solution to this problem?? mp3val says the files are not corrupted, so the issue must be itunes .. why wouldn't a delete/re-install fix the problem?

Hitting the "x" shouldn't be needed. This is an optional FEATURE that has run amok for too long.

Everyone annoyed about this, take 5 minutes to share your views on this with Apple at their official location for feedback. Despite threads here since 2009, apparently Apple doesn't care about the annoyance and time factors for every boot and sync once this "optional" feature gets going!

Tell them you want an off switch. That's all I'm looking for, to turn this feature off for good. If a live album ends up with gaps, it's much nicer than the so-called solution Apple came up with.

For me at least. If you agree, please send Apple your feedback here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Hi, reading throught the thread it seems that most people have problems with the Determining Gapless Information in that you struggle to use iTunes during its progress. I don't seem to have this problem thoughm the problem that I have is that it duplicates an awful lot of my songs meaning that if I am on an album it can have two of every song.

From what I can gather is that the original file is an MPEG-4 Audio file but it duplicates it as an MPEG Layer 3 Audio file. I've already spent hours deleting all these songs, the actual files and then on iTunes itself but now it has done this again and before I go through the laborious process again can anyone offer advice or has the same problem?

Just like to share my experience. Just convert to AAC using itunes. Problem solved…

brilliant, Mr Ong. would you be willing to come over and do that for all 30,000 tracks in my library?

@br0w3r

As mentioned, I'm just sharing experience. You do not need to be sarcastic about it.

Thanks Marcus!!! I was getting the Determining Gapless for over 500 (of 4440) songs and converted them to AAC like you suggested and it finally solved the problem! Maybe br0w3r won't have to do all 30,000 tracks to find peace. They were all recently added ones so it wasn't hard to find which albums they were. One tip for figuring out which ones to convert is to click in the iTunes "LCD" window at the top center in a blank area near where the X to stop the 'Determining' is. When you click and hold the mouse down in that display panel area it pauses the process so you can see the names of some of the songs in case they are whizzing by too fast to read.