Spent 2 hrs on this yesterday. Many songs (dosn't matter whether impoted from CD or directly bought through Apple) cut off at the 4 min mark. This started happening after I had had to copy my library of music etc from my backup drive to my computer drive after my computer crashed (for non apple reasons)
Anyway, to solve this type of issue, you just need to do a few simple steps.
1. make sure your itunes is the latest update (same with your ipod if you have one)
2. Once you verify your entire music library is still safely loaded on your backup drive, then delete all your itunes music from your computer drive (otherwise you have to inidvidually figure out which of your songs are messed up and delete them which can take hours)
3. Then, using the itunes import function (found under the Itunes file tab), pick the "Import File FOLDER."
4. Go to "Browse" and find your music folders on your backup drive, highlight them all, and import them. Please note that this will keep the original music files on your backup drive. (If you wish, you can copy the files to your actual computer drive first, and then find there and select them from there; your call.)
5. You will see itunes importing them and note that, after the original import of each song file, I noticed that it then says something like "checking for gaps in playback" and it goes through all the music files again and eliminates any gaps it detects in a song. After it has done that, you should not have anymore problems of itunes stopping at various points in song playback and moving onto the next song.
I am not an software guy or anything like that, just a frustrated user who found a way to solve a problem. The problem was caused when I directly copied the song files to the file location where Itunes typically will store your music files. I needed to use the actual "IMPORT" feature.
Hope it helps
Message was edited by: pdandbd
One more thing, once I had fixed the playback problem on Itunes on my computer, I then deleted all my IPOD music and re-synced it to Itunes. No more problems on my IPOD either.