Ok, so, kudos to Apple for stepping up and “solving’ the problem of gapless playback in iTunes, which has been a *problem* of sorts from the beginning of its existence. For those of you who have monkeyed around with sound formats, you know that mp3 compression often results in the addition of some silent samples at the beginning and end of song files, an artifact that means that ripped mix CD’s skip in between every track, rendering the diligence of the DJ null.
I’m guessing the solution created is to process every song file in your library and stick info about your silent bits either in every file or in the library information (haven’t looked at it yet). Unfortunately, the problem with this is that if you are like me, you’ve lovingly set aside your old G4 machine and given it the new job of file serving, media serving, and also jukebox. Every time Apple introduces such a fix, my G4 has to struggle through our entire Mp3 library, rebuilding the iTunes library file. The result — it’s crashed twice so far while “Determining Gapless Playback Information”. I’m glad there is a solution for gapless playback, but it seems like there would be a better way for updating the library than choking your computer for 30 minutes the first time you run iTunes after an update…
(Btw, what’s with the missing alternating horizontal lines in the music list view – are my eyes supposed to be spreadsheet enabled now?)
5 Comments
My problemis I’d like to TURN OFF the “determining gapless playback info” on iTunes, but there doesn’t seem to be that option?
I THINK I have a couple bad blocks on my hard drive, and iTunes will chug along fine for a few hundred songs and then just spin its wheels forever, and I have to do a hard reboot to get my Mac back. Meanwhile, I can’t go back to a previous version of iTunes, because it reports that the library can’t be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes.
Talk about a rock and a hard place… Anybody have any suggestions?
I have 47000 songs from 3500 CDs ripped by me and placed on a 500GB drive. All rips are of the highest quality VBR rip. The Music drive in question is a network drive so that the people in my home can access and use it as they desire. The problem lies within the collection of gapless playback info from itunes 7. It will take days to collect this information for just one computer let alone many computers or user profiles. This propogation delay is primarily because it is on the network, but alas we live in a networked world. What were the developers thinking. You would think that the developers would have considered all possible sources of music data, ie; local, usb, network, etc… At least give us an option to shut this shit off!!!!!!!
I certainly cannot use this product because of this limitation. If anyone has any clue as to shut this off i would appreciate this. i have tried the 1 second crossfading.. it does not work!!!
Regards,
james
james@tridelsolutions.com
Looks like a common gripe from what I can tell. That was part of the problem when I first ran it as well, although it wasn’t over a network. The weird thing is, there is now a setting in the track information that allows you to specify it as a gapless playback album or not, but there is no way of just telling iTunes *not* to assume that when you upgrade that you want the feature.I generally like the effect of the feature when you get it working, but it’s a pretty painful upgrade. Seems to me that the whole way that libraries are managed needs to be addressed – xml is great, but perhaps an iTunes “database” rather than a iTunes [XML] library would be better suited.
yeah in response to the first comment, i have exactly the same issue, i cant open itunes (it literally crashes to the spinning wheel of death about 3 seconds into determing the gapless info malarky) i have tried to install old versions of itunes, which dont work, and i am unable to delete itunes 7 because it states that itunes help is running, its a nighmare, i cant play any music, and i cant delete or intall any other itunes, its great because i have just bought a new ipod and am unable to use it all
if anyone knows of anything i can do it would be of a great help
cheers
sad to say it, but you may have to nuke your library and re-add the tracks…of course, that’s the last ditch effort…