audio stuttering

Hi AlienEyes. This keeps happening to me when I am foolish enough to succumb to iTunes' urging me to update. I've got an old computer running XP, not that I think that should matter given, as you have observed, other music playing software can play music fine.

Over a year ago, the fix that worked for me was turning off the iTunes crossfade:
Edit > Preferences > Playback > Crossfade songs OFF

However, this time, with crossfading already turned off, I had to go into Windows task manager and right click on iTunes.exe and set its priority to AboveNormal. That has fixed most of the stuttering (which was horrendous - even scrolling up and down a webpage triggered it). I have also been into the QuickTime's settings (via Control panel's classic view) and set the audio latency to 99msec. I'm still getting the odd extended note however.

My go-to solution is to unplug my speakers from the computer and plug them into my 20GB ipod instead. Only a bit annoying as the total music selection is more limited.

I had really bad audio stuttering with 11.0.0.44 whenever anything else occurred on the PC e.g. opening Firefox etc etc.

The solution for my PC, which was to change the 'Bits Per Sample For Audio' from 16 to 24 in the Playback settings.

I can now open other windows e.g. Firefox and there is no audio stuttering.

Regards.