[bojangles]

Hey, everybody. I picked up a B&W G3, a month or so ago, intending to use it as a cheap iTunes server. (My G5 was getting full, and besides, it seems like overkill to run my G5 all night when all I’m doing is streaming lullabies and classical music to my baby daughter’s AirPort Express. The G3 uses a lot less power!)

Unfortunately, iTunes has been stopping at random, almost every night or nap. Sometimes it’s after two songs, sometimes eight, sometimes a hundred, and sometimes it never happens. When it does, though, it just… stops. No warning, no nothing; I VNC into the G3 from the G5 and iTunes is just sitting there with nothing selected—not even the little speaker next to the current song—and nothing playing.

The G3 is running at 300MHz. It has 448MB RAM, which should be more than enough for Mac OS X v.10.4.7—especially when this computer is used for absolutely nothing more than iTunes 6.0.5 (and Finder, obviously, but that shouldn’t be a big deal). The hard drives are 160GB PATAs, 7200 rpm, in a mirrored RAID. Of course, the onboard IDE controller limits them to 120GB, but that doesn’t hurt my feelings, since it’ll be a long time before I have over 110GB of AAC files. The music is being streamed to a single AirPort Express, which extends from an AirPort Extreme Base Station in the next room (about 20 feet away).

Any thoughts?

[tooki]

I have seen that behavior when the computer, for some reason, stops seeing the AirPort Express on the network. I'd be willing to bet the problem would not occur if you were using the audio output on the G3.

So, try a different network cable. And/or check for sources of interference on the AirPort network. It's possible that someone else has a network or appliance (e.g. microwave oven or 2.4GHz cordless phone) that is interfering when used, causing the connection to be lost.

tooki

[bojangles]

Tooki,

Thanks for the tip. If the problem comes up again, I’ll be sure to check on that. However, I did discover something yesterday that seems to have helped the situation. (It may wind up being a temporary fix, but so far, so good.)

For some strange reason, there was an entire disc’s worth of—shall we say—anomalous songs. Whenever iTunes reached one of these songs (assuming it got that far; it would occasionally poop out before reaching them), it would play about the first half-second of the song, stop, delete the song from the playlist, and halt playback. After trying this several times, I finally deleted the entire disc from the iTunes Library (without deleting the files, natch), then dragged the AAC files back in. All of a sudden, everything started working again, and the playlist in question made it through the entire night (although my daughter’s sleep, unfortunately, did not; dang cold & cough).

I’ll keep you posted on any more problems.

[tooki]

Ah! Sounds like some corrupted files. I guess that would cause the problem, too!

tooki