Disabling iTunes Determining Gapless Playback

From a search of these forums, it appears there is no way to prevent this from happening, and there hasn't been one since they introduced this useless feature.
however if you can get it to finish on your machine, it will only need to be run the next time you upgrade itunes.
Best of luck...
AO <- yet another annoyed customer with the same problem.

I tried the old way of hitting the x to stop it>select all>get info>options and checked and unchecked the gapless album checkbox. That doesn't work any more. My fiancee' and digitized our CDs into one giant 83GB music collection and I'm tired of this crap. It takes a full 24hrs if we're lucky! I'm going to a global find and replace in the xml doc and see if that fixes it. This is sofa king we Todd Ed of apple to not make it an option.

I tried the old way of hitting the x to stop it>select all>get info>options and checked and unchecked the gapless album checkbox. That doesn't work any more

Never seen it work previously.
The *Part of a gapless album* checkbox only affects iTunes playback with Cross Fade enabled.
It simply tells iTunes to not cross fade songs if they are played consecutively and part of the same album.

m750 wrote:
this useless feature.

As someone who listens to live recordings on a regular basis, I would certainly not call gapless playback 'useless'.

Listening to a live album with an abrupt silent pause in the crowd noise between each song (or in the middle of a piece of music if the band runs two songs together, as many do onstage) is profoundly irritating.

Robin Johnson wrote:

m750 wrote:
this useless feature.

As someone who listens to live recordings on a regular basis, I would certainly not call gapless playback 'useless'.

Listening to a live album with an abrupt silent pause in the crowd noise between each song (or in the middle of a piece of music if the band runs two songs together, as many do onstage) is profoundly irritating.

Seconded.

While I agree gapless playback isn't a useless function, it is frustrating when the process never finishes. Mine freezes between song 300 and 700 every time and never finishes. I wouldn't mind sitting through this process once, but every time I sync my iPhone is annoying.

Well, the global find and replace in the xml file didn't do much for me. Still tried to determine gapless playback. Hours of research found a solution. It still involves a couple hours of pain, but it only has to happen once.

Background:
Here's the issue most of us are parobably facing- we ripped the MP3s with some other program or in a non-lossless format (i.e. m4a, AAC, etc.).

Why's it matter? Itunes uses propriatry tagging in the ID3 tag. It will only write to the MP3 tag if you used iTunes to Rip it. Most start with some form "Itun." Specifically for gapless playback, it uses "iTunSMPB."
Gotta give credit where credit is due: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=48231&st=136

Solution:
IMPORTANT- Ensure your Itunes is closed before proceeding, or the two programs will be trying to read/write to the same files at once, slowing your system to a crawl. One thing to note is that if you do have gapless albums, this could screw up the seamless track transitioning.

1. Download and install MP3 Tag editor - http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html
2. Open the program after it installs and point it to the root directory where all your music resides. Wait for it to build (Mine took about 10-15min with the 80+GB)
3. Click in the window with all the files and hit CTRL+A (apple+A for macaphiles) to select all.
4. Right click and select "EXTENDED TAGS" and wait a sec while it builds
5. Check the list of meta data and see if a ITUNSMPB exists. If not click the star icon to create. Otherwise double click it.
6. Drop the value "00000000 00000210 000007C8 000000000006BAA8 00000000 00026783 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000" into the value field.
7. click ok. You'll see the new value in the Metadata.
8. Click ok again and walk away.

The process shouldn't take anywhere near as long as the itunes process. And the good thing is you only have to do this once.

9. When it finishes, close the program and open itunes back up.
It will still do the "determining gapless playback" thing, but instead of contact the iTunes stroe DB, it reads from the metadata and goes waaaay faster. It took less than 5 minutes after, compared to the days prior.

Message was edited by: Zehnmonkey

-confused as to why you'd recommend a Windows application?

Is there a Mac version, or something similar for Mac?

Zehnmonkey wrote:
6. Drop the value "00000000 00000210 000007C8 000000000006BAA8 00000000 00026783 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000" into the value field.

This caused problems with some files. The fourth set of numbers in this tag is the length of the track in samples, and apparently sometimes iTunes use this tag to determine track length. If you use this example and find some of tracks being abbreviated at 2:36, it's because of this tag.

I haven't checked to see if just deleting the bogus tag is enough to fix the problem, but I have found that if you change the tag manually to assign the correct length, it doesn't take effect until after the next launch of iTunes, when the track is rescanned.

Of course, Apple could solve all of this very easily by just allowing us to disable the analysis manually. It'd be nice to not risk corrupting my files (again) to work around their bugs.

Keep force-quitting and sending hang reports. It's not acceptable for software written in the past 10 years to not have proper multithreading, especially for a premium brand.

It isn't possible to disable the function, but the problem is somewhere else. I had this problem too and with 19.000 songs over network it took about 10 hours to get iTunes to work!
Yesterday, finally, I found a little app, MP3 Scan + Repair, able to scan MP3-files for errors. I scanned all my library and now iTunes runs like a M...F...
This is a portation of a windows and linux app called MP3val.
Try this!
http://triq.net/articles/mp3-scan-repair-download