End of Song Repeats Itself Before Moving To Next Track

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Level 1

14 points

End of Song Repeats Itself Before Moving To Next Track

I can't seem to find any other answers in the forum to this, although the questions have been asked so I'm gonna try again for myself. I don't know if this is a full blown issues related to Catalina/OSX13/the new Music app but I'm having an issue where some songs when they reach the end of the track, will replay that last 20-45 seconds instead of moving to the next track (for example on a 3:00 minute song, once it hits 3:00 on screen it will stay there and the repeat the previous portion before actually ending and moving to the next track).

Now, I've tried what I think are the most obvious solutions based on the little bit I can find. I've tried deleting and resyncing the tracks from the app, testing them in OS X Music to see if the same problem occurs there (it doesn't), hard reset and reinstall of IOS13 all of which so far are coming up short. Having gone to a local Apple Store, the tech I spoke to said there are so many bugs and issues still sitting out there with Catalina & Music that it would be impossible to know where to begin, and the best suggestion he gave was to come back here to the forum in hopes that someone from Apple will read it and figure out a solution. The only thing I can isolate is that it doesn't seem to happening to songs that are purchased from the iTunes store, only from songs that are CD ripped or were downloaded from other MP3 locations (Amazon store, Bandcamp and the like). The obvious solution would be trying to re-rip/re-download these and see if they fix...but my library is ~30,000 songs of which only 10% or so is from iTunes store so need to avoid giving that as a solution as that is just untenable.

As a side note, this issue did not occur whatsoever prior to updating everything so hopefully somebody else out there has had this and fixed it with success.

iPhone XR, iOS 13

Posted on Nov 22, 2019 12:40 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

zetaeffe

Level 1

30 points

Jan 6, 2020 1:02 AM in response to hacker.32

I noticed that even if the Mac versions of the files seem ok in iTunes they are corrupted, too (if you open them e.g. in Audacity you will see the repeated ending). So I repaired the files in iTunes and then synced them to iOS.

To repair the Mac files I selected all the files I wanted to repair in iTunes and then "File -> Convert -> Create AAC version". This process creates a duplicate of every selected track without the appended ending, while preserving all the metadata. Moreover, it can be done for multiple files at a time.

You can then delete the old versions as explained here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5051826?answerId=22080099022#22080099022

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Answer 2

Jan 21, 2020 4:13 PM in response to zetaeffe

^Thats a good bit of info! It hadn't occurred to me the issue was duplicate data on the end of the file! Now, All the ALAC's I encoded were using an Apple SuperDrive connected via USB to my MacBook Pro, using iTunes. I recently bought dbPowerAmp to use its superior ripper. I will validate those files as I pull them in to see if it could be the SuperDrive causing iTunes encoder to puke at the end - maybe some sort of buffer issue. I've done about 30 discs so far with dbPowerAmp and all of them sound fine and are not repeating, but need a larger selection to be sure the Apple iTunes encoder is the issue.

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Answer 3

Dec 10, 2019 8:15 PM in response to hacker.32

I get this too with the Music App on iOS. This didn't occur in iOS 12. I only notice it happen when playing ALAC encoded songs. Sometimes the repeat is 5 seconds, other times it is 30 seconds or somewhere in between. I tried other music players like VOX (which is excellent), and the problem doesn't manifest itself. Well, I've seen it once, while I had the Apple Music app still installed. I've not seen it since Apple Music app was removed from the iPhone. My iPhone is an 8.

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Answer 4

hacker.32 Author

Level 1

14 points

Dec 11, 2019 3:13 AM in response to SidRipper

That's interesting that you've been having with ALAC files, most of my issue has been with VBR MP3s so it doesn't seem isolated to one file type after all. I wasn't sure whether any of the alternative apps on the store would actually work since from what I'd read a lot of them still require the Music app installed to access the library. May have to try that after all and see what happens.

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Answer 5

hacker.32 Author

Level 1

14 points

Jan 21, 2020 6:48 PM in response to SidRipper

Incidentally since I originally posted this...both answers have ended up being correct to some extent so I wouldn't call this fully solved as of yet, but enough to at least keep it as usable solution. As I dug into some of the bad playing songs with Audacity as zetaeffe suggested, the repeated sections were tacked onto the end as predicted so a simple delete and re-rip of the physical CD's I have did fix those that were readily available. What did not make sense though (and where I still have issue with calling this the complete solution) was a fair number of songs that were corrupted I had ripped with iTunes circa version 5/6/7 and never had the playback issues in the 10+ years since until everything changed over, which is why I still suspect it's still related to the new apps.

Fortunately though, the tracks that I knew came from good sources where the corruption was still occurring within the iPhone Music App and no issues shown Audacity was readily fixed by switching over to VOX as you suggested earlier where they play exactly as they should. It may not be the cleanest solution in terms of organization and visual appearance from a personal preference, but I'll take uninterrupted playback over that any day.

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