iTunes 10 poor audio quality

It's always poor quality and will never change. Unless you listen to just soft music, classical and no pop, rock or hip hop with any type of heavy bass. If thats the case, then your good. I wonder if anyone at Apple management have ever tried playing Holloback Girl from Gwen Stefani. Good luck, its so distorted, you just have to laugh.

Argggh. iTunes 10.3.1 (55) has issues playing back all kinds of music. Music I ripped from my CD collection, Music purchased from the iTunes Store. I reviewed this entire post and checked everything:, turning off the equalizer, checking the MIDI interface, ... Vocals go mysteriously missing on one song and then the next day they are back. The vast majority of my library is muddled.

I hope this helps someone...

Most of the issues in this thread (for both Mac & Windows) I believe can be cured by deleting the Preferences files for iTunes. In Final Cut Pro, sometimes the program starts doing incomprehensible things (poor audio, wrong sources, wrong video played with audio or vice versa). The solution is to delete the preferences files for FCP.

I started having pretty severe audio playback quality issues in iTunes for all of my music a few weeks ago & have (not very aggressivly) searched for a solution on the internet with no luck. So, I thought I might try to apply the FCP solution to the problem & it worked perfectly.

The files on mac are found in:

(mac system drive)/Users/(your user name)/Library/Preferences/

The files are:

com.apple.iTunes.plist

com.apple.iTunes.eq.plist

com.apple.iTunesHelper.plist

After you delete these files, iTunes will automatically replace them the next time you launch it & you'll have to put things back the way you had them before, but the audio will play properly.

Hope this helps.

I think I have stumbled onto something....

After reading this discussion with angst, I came to the decision that I would give up and use Windows Media Player... Yes it was that bad!!!... And yes i am a PC'er.............. I opened it for the first time in the year and a half since I've had the computer... It automatically imported my 4800+ songs... I wanted to immediately hear the difference.... So I went back to itunes to hear first... Specifically one song that was horrendous sounding... It was all of a sudden perfect!!!!... So I then closed WMP to make certain that itunes wasn't somehow pulling from WMP.... Nope!!!!!!!!

I'm not making a claim that it will work for everybody.... it just did for me...........

GOOD LUCK!

I to am having the same audio problems with 10.5. When playing tune brought from other websites, the sound quality was dreadful, with the tracks phasing at high frequency, unlisanable. I played the tunes in all other media formats (Real player, Windows media etc) and they all worked perfectly. I spoke with ITunes (so called) support who were about as much use as a chocolate fire guard. There knowledge is base leave at best!!! with tips like un install and re install itunes, thanks for that!!

Judging by the overwhelming comments regarding this matter, I feel that Apple should take note and sort this out ASAP.

I'm a Dj and need my music files. This is something I would have thorught quality control would have picked up on before sending us auto push updates of a product that is obviously flowed and disrupts my'n and othes listening pleasure!! This is something I will think about when considering to update to the latest version of................

PS if anyone has a workable suggestion other than dropping back to the previous versions that would be greatly received, this includes the boffin's at Apple!!!!!!

Best

Rotten Apple 10.5

I have tryied everything i think.

Including some 3rd party plugins and other stuff.

The sound quality seems to be cutted off?

Some frequencies are just turned off?

I think Jeff Robbin should start fixing that issue really soon.

In meanwhile i'm using Cog player, and its sound quality is outstanding (all Apple managers love that words - Outstanding, Gorgeos, Wonderful). Those words concerns 3rd party free player made by some guy in 2008 - Cog , and not iTunes.

You should try for yourself to hear a difference, but i asure You, its huge!

APPLE - fix sound quality in iTunes, to get it at least as close to Cog's quality as You can, or better.

Regards!

I was actually thinking about buying an iPad. Scratch that idea. If they can't make THIS work, I have NO confidence that it would work correctly either. Why waste money?😠

I think this is the fix, as simple as it is.

Turn down your prepamp in the equalizer unti lthe problem goes away. In my case, I have an Apogee Duet and I think becuase of the power of the converters I had to turn my Preamp all the way down to aboout 25%! I might even have to lower it more. This controls the amount of "gain" that iTunes is sending. If you lose volume just turn up the "volume" either in itunes or your interface. The amount of gain iTunes is giving is overloading the output of the interface.

This might only help those of us who are using high-end interfaces with really good converters. (MBox, Duet, etc.)

Thanks - the trashing the iTunes prefs solved my problem.

It was really distorting before (eq clean and no gain added) and now it's playing back as it should.

All,

I may have found the problem. Let me describe my symptoms and my fix:

I imported an alumn from disk where the original was just a series of MP3s - very clean and happy MP3s.

They sounded different in iTunes. They sounded bad.

I tried playing the imported copy in the iTunes library folder on disk. It sounded great.

The music on my phone sounded awful too. How strange.

Again, the music on disk sounded fine if I played it by pressing space or putting it in VLC

Fix:

In itunes, Right click, get info, Options

See that Volume Adjustment at the top. it should be at ZERO

I've filed a bug report with Apple so that they can check it out and see if it's truly repeatable but it was repeatable for me. I hope this helps!