iTunes 11.1.2 playback distortion

25th May 207 - Yes, I have the same issue and I am up to date with the latest ios - Sierra 10.12.5, on my 2016 Macbook Pro 15". Yes the play back music sound is horrible , distortion of low end frequencies , yes sounds just like a blown woofer, exhibiting fluttering of low end frequency distortion on audio playback from iTunes - with iTunes . Had a discussion with Apple tech support for an hour and half over the phone and waiting for a solution. Apple please resolve as I have invested in apple product believing it for good and high-end music experience.

i have found this distortion problem on only some albums. So what i did i dragged a few songs from iTunes into GarageBand to visually look at the songs waveform and could quite clearly see & hear the 'clipping' (or 'distortion' to the non audio engineer). I believe this could be a problem for some albums that are 'mastered for iTunes'. This needs to be fixed. The albums i found this problem with have been "Haelos - Full circle" & "Talk - Daniel Johns". I have had to buy the cds instead and rip them as apple lossless for best audio. Once i did this there was clearly no distortion. The problem is in the mastering process for iTunes.

you can see the clipping/distortion here - where the tops of the waveform get 'cut off'.

Same here. It's iTunes. I played the same song with QuickTime and in the Finder, and it's iTunes. Horrible. I played Come Together by The Beatles, and the bass was through the roof, all distorted.

Seems to be the left channel for me. Right channel seems fine. Also, bad sound on internal speakers, and Bose, via the analog jack, and Bose via AirPlay. Left channel bad!

This is putting a damper on my otherwise pleasant Apple day. What's a person to do without music?

Very frustrating indeed, hope they fix it soon, because I think most of us are used to using Itunes for music...

I had to check 'Manuall manage music and videos' and applied the settings.

Unchecked sync entire music library and selected a few playlists to sync.

After 3~4 attempts, this succeded and now I can sync the entire music library.

teddybear1216 wrote:

I had to check 'Manuall manage music and videos' and applied the settings.

Unchecked sync entire music library and selected a few playlists to sync.

After 3~4 attempts, this succeded and now I can sync the entire music library.

Wrong post maybe?

Same thing happened with me. Selecting your entire library, then Get Info>Options>Equalization and seting it to flat seemed to fix things. Pretty strange though.

I had this exact problem but i got it fixed, so to fix it go to window -> equalizer and play around with the presets then get back to the default one and it should fix the problem

Yeah, I noticed messing around with the EQ would let it play fine, then exiting the EQ window went back to distoration. After a few restarts, I think the issue has resolved itself somehow.

Bryan

yeP, it works really fine this way, but it's totally stupid... you have to wait that your WHOLE library switches to "flat"...
better that then nothing for now.

I can also varify the odd behavior of the equalizer. I would have it set to the 'Spoken Word' setting while listinging to a Podcast. Pause the playback and start the playback, and the sound would get distant. Change the equalizer setting, and it would work again. Do it again, and the sound would go distant again. The odd thing is that some of the equalizer settings would work, and then next they wouldn't in getting the sound back to normal.

I can varify that turnin off the equalizer and then turning it back on again will bring the sound back to normal. The does kind of do some sort of odd fading in and out for me before it stablizes to where it should be.

It is just odd. The equalizer has been in iTunes for how long, and they broke it now? Odd.