Song playback cut off early

I've been having this issue with recently added albums, both on my Mac (iTunes 12.5.5.5) and also on my iPod Video 5G (which seems to reinforce the idea that all of this is due to some messed up gapless metadata generated by iTunes).

What's the definitive and easiest solution? I've seen lots of theories and suggestions on this same thread but I don't want to mess up anything or do unnecessary complicated things. :s

Hi Dupin

I solve this issue in my playlist if I convert my mp3 songs to AAC.

When I include an mp3 in my music library, I stop the sync reproduction without stops (circle spinning icon appears in the top right of the window, click on road icon, menu appears and stop the sync in the "X" checkbox). Hurry up because this task takes only a few seconds when you copy the mp3 to library music... (I think that this task corrupt the mp3 label, and this is the issue that cuts your song before finish).

The next step is select your mp3 file and convert to AAC.

I've fixed my songs cuts and my iTunes hangs since I do this operation and convert the mp3 to AAC songs (important to stop the synchronization of uncut playback)

Hope you help. Regards. Pablo

What if my messed-up music is already on the iTunes library? Obviously I can't stop any process or task by now.

The other weird thing is this: I've just added a new album to iTunes (12.6.3.6) on my iMac. Supposedly the bug was already solved, according to OP, long time ago, but I'm still having the same problem.

I have to clarify though that I copied that album from the iTunes folder in my MacBook (I was having this problem there too). I guess the messed up metadata was already embedded in those files, so when I added them to iTunes in my iMac I experienced the same problem again. My big question then is how am I supposed to take out all these messed up music files from the library and then add them again if they already have the wrong metadata. :S

Does it make sense?

I've had the same problem with particular songs in my library that end suddenly and skip to the next track, going back several versions of iTunes & operating systems. When I play the same song files on VLC or Quicklook, they play normally, so the problem seems to be rooted in iTunes. The skip persists when I add the same files to my iPod. I tried checking the start/stop time option in the song info, but the settings would revert to unchecked and the skip would remain the next time I played the file.

But.. I found a fix that is working consistently! I converted the skipping files to AAC (from Mp3) using iSonics and re-added them to iTunes, and no more skipping. I left all settings the same such as bit rate & sample rate, so that seems unrelated. It's odd that only some files from the same album/rip are affected. It may not be practical to try and covert all the songs in a library, but for me, I'll just fix files as I come across them.

It's not fixed in 12.3.1.23. I was running v11.4 in 10.5.7, 10.6.8, 10.9.5 10.10.5 and 10.11.x, the last of the great iTunes players, and started getting errors when trying to use sharing and the stores in the later OS's. So since I started running Beta 12.3.1.23 in Beta 10.11.x and it seemed OK, I thought I would try it in 10.10.5. BIG MISTAKE! Going from 11.4 to 12.3.1.23 I lost Gapless and links to 27,000 tracks and I can't revert using the old methods that we could. So if it is as you are saying a bug from 12.3.0.44, I don't think that's all of it . . .

I found a simple solution for this. All the songs I was having an issue with had the m4p extension. I changed the extension to m4a, which I did not actually expect to work, and my issues with the songs stopped. They all started playing to completion without any loss of quality.

Did you re-sample the tracks or just change the extension?

I simply changed the extension, nothing else. Worked for me.

Yeah I have found that deleting and re-importing song-by-song only works sometimes. But that wouldn't be a reasonable long-term solution anyway, would it?

I have seen this problem posted to the forums a lot over many years, so I do not think it is a problem with recent versions of iTunes.

Many people propose something along the lines of deleting and re-importing all songs, or re-encoding all songs, etc. But... I don't know about you, but my library is 16,500 songs (not even as big as many others) and that is waaaay impractical.

I haven't noticed any commonality among the skipping songs. They are all of various file types, encoded differently, etc. I have tried dragging and dropping in batches, dragging and dropping individually, highlighting groups of ten songs and hitting Enter... I have tried editing the "end time" of songs, but even if that were to work, it is one of those song-by-song band-aids.

I have no solution and the problem manifests itself in a completely random way.

I am thinking long and hard about switching to foobar...