itunes 11 poor audio quality

I have had the most irritating day behind my notebook today.

Some of my music files quality after installing itunes 11 is just awful.

Even if i do the preview on songs in the store they are VERY bad.

I have installed other music players and the same files in the other music players are just fine.

Now what could have gone wrong, are we seeing the same as the new maps debacle here ?

roanmurray wrote:

Now what could have gone wrong, are we seeing the same as the new maps debacle here ?

This is many ways worse, since the vast majority of issues

with Maps is simply bad or incomplete databases. iTunes 11

is worse since it is just very poor quaility programming. I can't

believe that they (Apple) delayed to turn out this poorly working, poorly

conceived dribble. They should have delayed another 2 months, or more

to get it right.

Upgraded to v11 and the sound is awful! Can't use iTunes as my media player anymore.

I won't mention the pathetic tablet like interface thats dumbed down the application

This is incredible ... The worst update ever, seems like Windows Vista, is a complete nightmare .

Yes, I am having this exact same issue as well, and have no idea what to do, if there is no solution, I am just hoping that will be fixed with an update or something.

I could not agree more. Other media/audio players, e.g. even windows media player, outperforms itunes by far. Maybe it's time to stop using itunes for playback, despite the convenience? Have any one heard anything about Aplle recognising teh problem?

They Audio quality is very poor. I have Bose speakers and they sound awfull now. Tried with different audio player, same acc files (bought from itunes by the way) and with different player they sound perfect 😟

Please solve this at once. Itunes was the best player around, now it's the worst 😟

Clearly there are some "enhancements":

• Voices seems to clear and grainy, they lack smoothness
• bass are better for me than on iTunes 10, while it doesn't seems unnatural, it may cause problem on system that have poor bass, or conceived just to do "boom-boom" 🙂
• Attacks (wether it's voice or instruments) are also "enhanced" and may seems unnatural

I had written an article about it: http://mhackintosh.com/itunes-11-sound-enhancements/

I am trying so hard to not believe this. I am sitting here with my Beyerdynamics, searching for differences and ways that things have changed. Barely noticing any difference acousticlly I broke out pd and decided to let fourier analysis do the thinking for me.

So here is what I did. I took an rfft (a type of fft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform) and then squared the real and imaginary outputs and added them together then took the square root to change the polar coordinates into rectangular form. This is the same process I use when creating spectrum data for reverbs and instrument synthesis. What this basically does is gives me a amplitude readout per frequency. By putting this together into simply all amplitude data I summed all amplitudes over the whole song. Using sound flower I made sure that no noise was induced and that the sound never hit a AD/DA. So we are talking simply the data output from iTunes here. I then took these amplitude sums for Little Black Submarines by the Black Keys in four programes that I could get almost identical gain out of.

Here are the results:

iTunes:

Right Channel = 1.0543e+06

Left Channel = 1.04035e+06

Right / Left =1.01341

Finder:

Right Channel = 1.05904e+06

Left Channel = 1.04498e+06

Right / Left = 1.01328

Quick Time:

Right Channel = 1.0594e+06

Left Channel = 1.04534e+06

Right / Left = 1.01345

VLC:

Right Channel = 1.05933e+06

Left Channel = 1.04546e+06

Right / Left = 1.01346

Average (Finder, Quick Time, VLC)

Right Channel = 1.05926e+06

Left Channel = 1.04526e+06

% error [(average - iTunes)/Average * 100]

Right Channel = 0.468239%

Left Channel = 0.470247%

Ok, so what does this say? Not much. I think that the system I used does have flaws. It does have a smple rate and subsequent trials do show a difference because of this. However, the results are pretty consistent. iTunes is of by just a bit. This could be gain definitions within the programs them self, or a multitude of other things. One thing it does point out is that there is a differece of some sort. When I am done with finals I will investigate more. However, I could not really hear much of a diference at all. I mean last night I used the same song as a reference song in finder through ProTools HD I/O, into an API 1608, and then into a pair of Focal Twin6 BE w/ a genelec sub, and what I am saying is that your system is going to have the greatest impact on sound. and many of these systems could only hope to have a .4% difference in even different versions of the same model run. With that being said a really really good human ear can only hear a 1db change, thats a 12% change in amplitude. I; however, will give this one more attempt with a bit more accurate programming when I am done with finals.

AdamMLock It's not because you don't have any problem, that the problem should be ignored.

The bass from a lot of my files sound distorted and that has been reported by many on different topics. And that's not because they have crappy speakers. Probably it's just reverse. And all those that are complaining are the people who know anything about audio and the can HEAR the difference.

I tried with many different files mp3, flac, m4a. And they have it. I use a macbook 13" 2010 version with 8gb ram and a 256SSD. With Bose companion 3 speakers. THose are not studio speakers. But they are not crap either

And indeed I have some people around me that i now they are expierienced too and they don't have any problems.

So please don't react like you did some tests and you are right ;-)

We are not speaking about the the difference from audio feel. Yes that indeed has changed.

We are speaking about DISTORTED sound even when equalizer is set to OFF.

Regards

The same track played from Finder sounds way better than it does played from itunes 11. I pressume they will make an improvment to this.

I have never used the equaliser. I choose good quality speakers and headphones which enables me to listen to the track the way the artist created it. Right now iTunes is spoiling that. I have stopped using iTunes to listen to music for the time being, certainly at parties etc.

There is a very popular thread in here ( https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4555356 ) with 952 posts on it in a month but reading through I haven't seen any other mentions of the audio quality. Obviously there are some comments scattered around, including this thread, but given how obvious the sound difference is to me I'm a bit surorised that there aren't more people noticing.

Could you all do me a favour and test this? Choose a good quality track in itunes and then right click to show in Finder. Play the track in itunes, then go to Finder, hit the space bar (with the track file selected) and let me know if you can't hear the difference.

Yes, I have this same problem ... I thought it was the fact that I was using mp3's so I went back and reproduced the original media into .aiff files just to check it out, but the music is awful sounding on iTunes 11 compared to any other media player on my Macbook Pro Retina 15". VLC, Quicktime, MPlayerX all sound MUCH better than iTunes ...