Music stops playing partway through and skips to next song in iTunes and on iPhone

Will the songs play in Quicktime?

I’ve read reports from many other iTunes users who are having the same issue I am. Please read on...

When listening to songs that I purchased from iTunes (as opposed to those I imported from CD), several, but not all, of them stop playing prematurely several seconds (or even minutes) before the end of the tune. Playback jumps immediately to the beginning of the next tune.

I noticed this, I believe, shortly after moving my iTunes library to a new iMac (3.1 GHz Intel Core i5, 12 GB memory) running iTunes 10.5.3 (3) on Mac OS 10.7.3. Everything was fine before the move.

Of the 283 purchased songs in my iTunes library, about 100 of them exhibit this behavior. The song playback times at which this happens range from 2:14 to 5:19.

What is interesting, is that tunes from the same album all end at the same playback time! For example, I purchased the whole album “River - The Joni Letters” (Herbie Hancock’s album covering a number of Joni Mitchell tunes). Every song from that album now stops playing at 3:39. The same happens with other tunes that happen to be from the same album, too. I have no idea why this would be the case, but it certainly seems significant.

Another interesting finding, is that if I copy one of tunes exhibiting this issue to the desktop and play it from there, the song plays all the way through to the end without a problem. This would, I think, rule out a corrupt file and tend to point to iTunes itself as the source of the problem.

The problem certainly is annoying, and it would be great if we could find some resolution and get back to enjoying our music without the mind-jarring bump that too often now happens without warning.

Sincerely,

Michael Loomis

The only succussful answer I have seen on this subject was when somebody applied a system update, but it looks like you're runnng the newest already. I guess you could try re-applying it, making sure you repair permissions both before and after. I know of cases where an update wasn't properly applied because of incorrect permissions, though not in your particular situation.

I use an older operating system so I don't know if it is still the same. If I wanted to do it I would go find the update on Apple support downloads page and download it.

Repair permissions with Disk Utility.

I've seen this issue before on this forum but I can only suggest you browse back in case somebody had a solution I missed.

It would be interesteng to know if it does this in iTunes in a different account on your computer, suggesting it is either a conflict with something else, or maybe a library or some profile issue...

I tried this. Copied two songs I knew to skip to my wife's account, deleted them from my iTunes and switched to her iTunes. Played flawlessly. Reimported the songs into my account - played flawlessly! I shall set up a playlist for skippy songs ("Skippy") and run this every month.

+1 to mdloomis. I have the same problem.

This is the closest question to my situation. During podcasts and music, Itunes will just stop the broadcasted item for some unknown reason. Computer, Itunes and permissions are all up to date. I put this here in case Apple decides to try and figure out what's wrong.

If I restart Itunes it will be a while before it happens again and restarting the computer also helps but after a while it starts again.

I have this problem on AppleTV playing from the cloud. It makes no sense. It has been fine until a few weeks ago. This just started happening. I have seen to skip at 1:02 minutes on every song. I then applied an update to AppleTV. Now it is as described above (10% of the songs don't finish and skip to the next song). Times are varied.

Given I saw a consistant 1:02 for some time, and the AppleTV update changed the behaviour, one should think it's a bug in Itunes somewhere?

Any further ideas?

Is Apple/ iTunes goign to do something about this? It seems to occur on both my laptop and iPod Nano randomly, but once a song is affected the damage is done. This morning nearly every song from one artist cut off about 3/4 of the way through the song and skipped to the next. The issue seems to be happening more frequently.

We need a fix Apple, these songs cost alot of $$