Q: itunes chopping off end of songs now that i signed up for match

So this thread is almost two years old, users are still reporting the same issue, and Apple refuses to do anything about it other than have us rebuild our entire libraries, which still doesn't address the root cause.

I've had this problem for over two years. A recent upgrade to an iPhone 5 had me restoring everything to the new device from iCloud, which seemed to make the problem go away. That was four weeks ago. This week, it has reared its ugly head again.

FIX THE PROBLEM, APPLE. THIS IS WHY CUSTOMERS GO LOOKING ELSEWHERE.

This just began with me when streaming...I deactivated a laptop so that I could use home-sharing for my new laptop...now songs are being cut off. This doesn't happen on other devices.

WHAT'S UP WITH APPLE?! These are supposed to be the top R&D people around...FIX IT! I canNOT believe this has been a problem for so many people for so long!

Our itunes library is far TOO LARGE to go through song by song as suggested by some. If this continues my husband will hopefully conquer the problem.

Thanks for the info

Becka

I found that syncing my ipod without the offending songs then resyncing with them fixes the problem for those songs. However, after a couple of weeks, the problem crops up again on a different song.

Thanks--but if the problem is in the master library on the computer that things are sinked to, I don't know how you could apply this strategy.  Which is the case for me.

Doesn't apple's policy of ignoring this issue sound more like the demons in Bellevue than the saints of Cupertino?

I've been lurking lots of discussion boards and Robsmith78 provided a simple solution that worked...songs were complete but were "ending/cutting off early" in itunes (played fine on iphone). I tried everything from deleting the songs, redownloading, creating a new itunes, etc. thanks

I've followed this thread from the beginning since we have the exact same issue.  Songs played over Apple TV 3 and on 2 iPod device (Touch 5 and Nano) randomly truncate.  I can play the same song multiple times and it won't do it every time.  We have three different libraries we're synching to from, one on a PC for my wife's Nano, one on a PC for my Touch and one on an iMac for Apple TV.  I'm done rebuilding my library, trying to re-synch, and every other bogus "fix" that Apple tries to push off for this.  Since Apple seems completely disinterested in a resolution I will research another device to stream my music and videos and watch MLBTV and sell these devices and go back to portable players that synch with Windows Media Player.  Never had an issue with those.

Yep, I too am now having this problem. Listening to music using iTunes on my PC and accessing a shared library from my Mac Mini. Songs randomly cut short and move on to the next track. This has only started happening recently. These tracks are all ripped from CDs to Apple Lossless, there is nothing wrong with the tracks as I've played them a lot without issues before. To reiterate, this has just started happening now, perhaps as a result of 10.8.5 but can't say for sure.

I just talked to Apple Support about this. Although they word things always diplomatically they seem to be aware of this problem, but dont have a fix for this problem yet. The support agent just assumed this may be related to the new iOS7. I told him he should look through the many threads concerning this issue on their own support forums to see that this has been going on much longer. So, except for some of the beforementioned workarounds that may or may not work, there is NO official solution to this.

As for myself I actually only startet noticing this problem about two weeks ago when I matched the latest album by Placebo. I didnt buy it from the iTunes store, but Amazon. Matched the songs on iTunes match, re-downloaded them to my iphone and all of them cut off about a minute before the end and skipped to the next song thus having the playhead still playing the previous song. The re-downloaded tracks played fine on my Macbook, the problem only occurs on my iphone and not with every album or song, but randomly, but if it happend  its always full albums that are affected. Like Placebo's, the new Kings of Leon etc. Others and particularly the old ones I had matched for a longer period all seem to work fine !

I tried to find out what would happen if I buy the same songs that dont play correctly when downloaded with itunes match from the itunes store. I tried it with Placebos album and they play flawlessly. So the itunes store download works fine, itunes match download is cutting off.

So it seems that macthed songs downloaded from itunes match servers are coming off different servers than the ones in the itunes store. The iTunes match server seems to corrupt something when Apple puts songs on there, but only for iOs devices. I truly hope they find a fix for this soon, otherwise I will just have to end my subscription as this needs to be rock solid for me.

Solutions like full erase, reset and new syncing of content to my iphone is out of the question. I know how painfui this is from syncing my almost completely used 64GB from backups to new iphones. Also, I dont think anybody needs to worry it only affects older iOs devices. I had this problem first with my iphone 5 , now I rjust eceived a new iphone 5S with iOS7 pre-installed by Apple. Same problem.

I urge each and everyone of you to report this problem to Apple directly through their support phone numbers and email. Keep posting your experiences here on the forums, BUT the more complaints Apple gets directly the more aware they are of this problem I think

I have found a solution and am posting my write-up for everyone.

Luckily, this is not caused by file corruption. Based on what I have been reading in this forum, it is presumably caused by a damaged playlist entry, probably upon import of the song into Itunes from another location, such as a backup.

The bad entries can be reliably and easily found by playing each song in your library and jumping to the end. What I discovered by analyzing where the songs broke is that, consistently, only 4 minutes and 10 seconds of any broken song would play. Why this is I don't know, but it shows that Itunes is breaking the entries in a consistent manner. It's also helpful to know the cutoff point of your broken songs, since, once you've established it by finding a few of them, you can fine tune your identification of songs that break off very close to the end by sorting your library by Time. Hover your mouse cursor very close to the end of the playbar and allow each song to play to the end; if the song is not broken, it should count down all the way to :00. Then, once Itunes advances to the next song, just click on the mouse to advance that song to the very end, and so forth. If you hover your cursor near, say, the :03-second mark of the playbar, you should be able to go through about 20 songs per minute. In my case I was able to find a few more songs that were just a few seconds longer than 4:10 and which broke off very close to the end.

In my case, whether Itunes could have broken any song shorter than 4:10 I do not know. Out of a library of 225 songs, I didn't find any. Only eight of my songs were broken, they were all over 4:10 in length, and they were all imported on the same date.

If the entry is bad, the song will refuse to play when you advance the playbar past the cutoff point. Itunes will simply move on to the next song.

Also, going on the assumption that these entries are damaged in a batch import, you might be able to quickly isolate most or all of the other damaged entries by sorting your list of songs by the "Date Added" field, and then performing the steps above to confirm which entries are damaged.

Once you have your list of damaged entries, the solution is to delete the song from Itunes and then re-import it. First, however, right click the song and choose "Get Info" to identify the file's location on your hard drive. Then, right-click the song and choose "Delete." Itunes will ask you if you want to move the song to the Recycle Bin. This is not necessary and will only force you to restore the song from the Recycle Bin, so just say no by choosing "Keep File." Then, you can import the song back into Itunes in one of two ways. Both methods work, but I find the first method to be faster. From within Itunes, click on File | Add File to Library, then locate the file on the disk and import it manually. Outside of Itunes, you can locate the file on the computer and tell it to open in Itunes, and it will be imported to the Itunes library automatically.

-Paul Ronco, Computer Technician

This worked for me too!  It's more than a little annoying that iTunes hasn't come up with an actual fix, but in the meantime this workaround keeps me in good tunes (all the way to the end!).

Way too much work for a problem that so many are having. I'm ready to get outta here and go back to the droid. The fact that I have to spend days trying to figure this out is enough to make me get rid of this iPhone 5S.   Some songs play till end others cut 3/4 in. Ridiculous

I think this works

iTunes Library Toolkit (for Windows)

http://klarita.net/itlt.html

Option

Update Attributes - detects modified attributes in the media files and updates the iTunes track attributes to match.

Is there a Mac version of this?  Has anyone tried it?

I'm having this problem, too.  My iPod was always cutting off songs.  A recent burglary resulted in the theft of my iPod.  I am now streaming music from my MacBook Pro to Apple TV and songs are randomly being cut off.  I'm listening now and "Gimme Shelter" was just cut off; it's never happened to that song before.  Just before that, "R.O.C.K in the U.S.A" was cut off, first time again.  Does Apple even read these freakin' postings?  I'm beginning to realize that Apple doesn't give a ***** about us or their allegedly superior products.  They just want to control our lives and our behavior.

I too am experiencing the same problem where the song will cut off approximately 30 seconds before it ends and start the next selection at that point. I noticed that this problem cropped up after the last update to IOS7.03 on my iPhone 4S. I did not have any problems before that update, ever.

I tried erasing all the music on my iphone and re-sync'ng but problem persist. I tried to factory restore the phone and a clean restore from backup to no avail. I tried turning off iCloud sync, auto-download but nothing worked. I tried reinstalling IOS7.03 and again clean install everything but the problem is still there.

I noticed though that it only effects purchased songs. I hope Apple can fix this problem soon because I do use my iphone as a music source as I travel everyday.