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Short interruptions of sound when playing music on iTunes
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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My 2.16 Ghz white 24" iMac sometimes gives small interruptions in the music that's playing on iTunes.
Like a quarter second stutter.
Does this mean my sound card is going bad, or worse, my motherboard?
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Moderator
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: San Jose, CA
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No, it means that some other process is using CPU cycles, causing a drop in performance in playback. Open up Activity Monitor and organize processes by %CPU to find which app might be using a large amount of the processor.
Steve
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Celebrating 10 years and 4000 posts on MacNN!
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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Interesting, and a relief.
I had Photoshop CS5 open, Bridge CS5, Fetch, but I was not using it, taking a break and reading a book and listening to music.
So I can't really see what would have taken iTunes to interrupt.
I've had iTunes running with Photoshop saving huge TIFF files, and no interruptions.
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Administrator
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: California
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How much RAM do you have? Interruptions can happen if the system needs to swap some memory to/from cache.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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My iMac is maxed out at 3 Gb.
Anyway, as long as it's not something starting to fail I'm fine (just had a quite expensive repair of the power supply unit).
I just never had this happen before.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
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Yeah, that sounds strange. I've never heard iTunes stutter on OS X. It's not a normal thing to experience. The file you were playing could be corrupt, or you may be experiencing hard drive problems.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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iTunes uses a special priority mode which means that it should never stutter (it was a big change when this arrived in 10.1), and in any case you'd have to have something saturating both cores for this to happen for CPU reasons. Unless you (or some process) had reniced iTunes, this priority mode should be able to handle anything.
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The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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I'm still on iTunes 9.1
So, no priority mode.
Today I experienced it while Photoshop was saving a large, layered TIFF file, and Bridge rendered a preview at the same time.
It doesn't bother me at all if this happens once in a while - I was only concerned if it was a hardware issue - which it isn't.
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Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Originally Posted by Veltliner
I'm still on iTunes 9.1
So, no priority mode.
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I meant Mac OS X 10.1, and whatever iTunes came with it. Sorry for the confusion.
Originally Posted by Veltliner
Today I experienced it while Photoshop was saving a large, layered TIFF file, and Bridge rendered a preview at the same time.
It doesn't bother me at all if this happens once in a while - I was only concerned if it was a hardware issue - which it isn't.
It sounds like there is some other resource contention rather than just the CPU. Odd.
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The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: UK
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Could be a hard drive on its way out. Does anything else stutter? Installers or copying files?
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I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
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Moderator
Join Date: May 2001
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Originally Posted by Veltliner
I'm still on iTunes 9.1
That's likely part of the problem: I've also had audio hickups with iTunes 9, all of which went away with iTunes 10. You should update iTunes and then see if problems persist. In my experience, iTunes 10 is significantly faster, no more 1+ second lags when skipping songs, yay!
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I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep
Could be a hard drive on its way out. Does anything else stutter? Installers or copying files?
A brand new 1 Tb Hitachi Desk Star, just installed by certified repair.
Haven't noticed any other stutters.
As others noted, I think it's just an iTunes 9 thing. And my computer isn't exactly the fastest, while my files are getting larger all the time.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
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Originally Posted by OreoCookie
That's likely part of the problem: I've also had audio hickups with iTunes 9, all of which went away with iTunes 10. You should update iTunes and then see if problems persist. In my experience, iTunes 10 is significantly faster, no more 1+ second lags when skipping songs, yay!
You had 1 sec+ lags? That's a record.
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Administrator
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: California
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iTunes is getting smarter all the time (also developing feature bloat). You haven't said what music you are playing. It's possible iTunes is hesitating on song playback because we would too.
... just a thought.
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