Songs rewinding after pressing pause?

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Songs rewinding after pressing pause?

When pausing a song, either by pressing the Pause button manually, using the shortcut on my keyboard, or using the spacebar, when I play it again it will rewind partially.

The shorter the song, the shorter it will rewind; if the song is something like 3 minutes long, it will rewind a second or two. However, on large songs which are an hour or more long, such as continuous albums etc, it can rewind maybe 10-20 seconds. It's as though it is rewinding to a fixed spot as well.

After researching, I can find nothing except a similar query to mine but it was happening with podcasts. I don't listen to podcasts so I can't comment here, but I know that my songs are rewinding after pausing.

I have noticed it only tends to happen to songs a certain bitrate (VBR), songs with 320kbps for example don't rewind.

I can't find anything to turn it off or disable it, but it is extremely annoying when a song rewinds. Any solutions would be appreciated. (I have done the basics as in restarting the application and restarting my Macbook Pro, this did nothing).

Thank you

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Apr 7, 2012 9:00 AM

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Answer 1

Jedidove

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Aug 1, 2012 4:22 PM in response to KeNJii

It turns out that this is a *very* old issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1305704

I myself have experienced this for a very long time, as I have been using VBR for a very long time. Until today, I thought it was a "feature" that let you hear the last little bit before the pause over again in case you missed it or want the added context (it can be nice when you paused because you were interrupted by someone). However, I learned that this is NOT a feature today when I tried to find the setting to disable it.

I also figured out that iTunes will not even let you PLAY a VBR song from any given point. Go ahead and try to scroll to some random exact time then hit play. The song will jump back to a fixed point that can be a good couple of seconds earlier. These "fixed points" are the same points that you'll find the song jumping to after a play/pause cycle. KeNJii, you are spot on on this point. It isn't a set amount of time it rewinds; it rewinds to the last of a set of predefined fixed points. I'm seeing the same correlation to song length too. Longer songs consistently have longer gaps between the fixed points.

I have found this issue to be a problem with all VBR encoded MP3s I have tried. It is not an issue with all constant bit rate tracks I have tried. In combination with some googling, this suggests that it is definitely a problem with iTunes playing back VBR. All of my VBR MP3s are encoded by LAME so I can't speak for other encoders. If someone has an iTunes VBR encoded track give it a shot and let us know. Make sure to try a few spots in the song, as it is possible to accidently play/pause or scroll/play exactly at a fixed point, in which case it won't seem like there is an issue.

The most annoying thing about this is that despite there being 3 threads over 5+ years and an exact diagnosis, Apple has not bothered to even acknowledge any of the issue reports.

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