Fix for distorted sound in itunes ver 7.0

I tried the QT fix and the "above normal" fix and it will work as long as I don't tax my processor. Anything that makes my proccessor run high, my music clips bad and it gets very annoying. Did'nt have this problem with the previous version of itunes, so I'm a little perterbed about it.

The fix only partially worked for me. There seems to be more than one problem. Changing to 16 bits made the songs clear (previously so distorted and noisy they weren't intelligible), but...
There are all these pops and clicks and stutters. They seem to be related to CPU. If I increase the iTunes priority in task manager, things are a bit more smooth, but even opening a browser window to make this comment had the music sputtering.

iTunes is demanding 5 - 25(!)% cpu doing nothing but playing a song. The CPU seems to actually go up when another app is in the foreground. I guess I'll be using WinAmp till Apple fixes this...

Dell Windows XP Pro phew

The plot thickens!

I was having the same issues.
I upgraded to 7.0.0.70 last night and everything worked fine. Then after listening to a few songs it suddenly sounded like my old record player when the stylus was full of fluff.

I tried the suggestions of dropping the bit rate to 16bit but this made iTunes just stutter on the first 1/4 second of a track and hang, task manager required to kill iTunes.

Then after playing a music video it started working. Tracks now play fine. This is not the fix though!

The fix was to max the volume in iTunes! as soon as I drop the volume, back comes the distortion!

I am currently running at 96kHz 24bit and it sounds great.

This really is a buggy pile of software and whoever ran the user testing before release wants firing as this shoud have been picked up in any decent user test!

These are the default settings for me and I've messed with every possible configuration. I don't know why this is the "fix" that everyone is throwing around. It doesn't work for me or any of my friends. I reverted back to 6.05 until a working version of iTunes 7 can be released.

Reducing sound acceleration by one notch took away my static.

Control Panel>Sounds>Audio>Speakers>Advanced.

Or something close, I'm not on my home rig.

soundcard is Audigy II MP3 for the record.

For those still having an issue, has iTunes completed processing gapless info?

Depending on your library's size, processing gapless information may take a while.

Apple seems to do great things - for Macs! itunes is the right program for me, but the annoying sound issues make it difficult to accept in a PC environment.

Please continue to post suggestions, as I have spent 2 days with every combination of adjustments on this board.

Thank you.

Dell Pentium D 2.8, 1GB Windows XP Pro

Wow that finally worked. Now I can work and listen to music again, thanks a bunch.

Unfortunately I've tried this as well, and I still can't get ANY sound out of my Windows iTunes!!

I have a question for you. Now the sound is good again, my God was it terrible, the music now skips, it's more similar to a hang then a skip, nonetheless, it is super annoying and need to get rid of it.

Nope didn't work for me, my settings were already at those or lower.

Details about the problem:
-Never happened before i upgraded to ver 7
-Happens when under CPU load like playing WoW
-Playing songs in other media players like winamp works fine so its not my soundcard ( it's an Audigy 2 )
-I have a dual core cpu so i changed the affinity of WoW and iTunes so there were on different CPU's.. still didn't help so it's not my cpu
-It's really annoying and will rolling back to a previous version of iTunes as soon as possible.

Nothing suggested works for me so far.

Did they only bother testing the new ITunes on Macs?

I had this same problem with one of the relatively recent ITunes updates. That time, changing that Quicktime setting to 16 fixed it.

Nothing at all has worked for me. Time for people to start listing there sound cards, as there appears to be a huge bug that Apple needs to work on.

I have an EMU0404(Creative Pro line) I have the latest windows updates, latest sound card drivers, latest directx updates as well.

Itunes 6 worked fine, and my other audio application Foobar2000 0.9.4 works fine, in both ASIO and wave modes.

I'm in the same boat as everyone else. iTunes 6 worked great, but version 7 starts stuttering and scratching audio at the slightest hint of any other decent cpu usage.
I can do it consistenly by loading windows media player and playing a video (with the sound muted) and moving around in the video, or just watching it for that matter.
I've got a dual-core 3ghz system with 2GB of memory. I've got a massive overkill amount of system for doing something as simple as decoding mp3/aac files.

Apple really screwed something up here. I've tried all the various 'workarounds' listed in this thread (and others) to no avail. Let's hope they get this fixed quickly. 😟

(reply didn't show up where I thought it would - edited and removed)