Audio playback randomly freezes on iPod, skips to next song in iTunes.

Question

When I'm listening to music on my iPod, at a random point in certain songs the audio will suddenly cut out, the play progress bar and time keeper will freeze, and yet the icon indicates that the song is still playing. When listening to those songs through iTunes, at the same points rather than freezing up, it will simply skip to the next song, similar to what it would do if I had edited the options to make the song end sooner than it normally would. I have gone through these songs and checked that option under the "get info" menu and the song end time has not been altered. What has happened to my music, and is there any way to fix it short of whiping out half my library and starting from scratch?

Answer 1

I’ve read reports from many other iTunes users who are having the same issue I am.  Please read on...
When listening to songs that I purchased from iTunes (as opposed to those I imported from CD), several, but not all, of them stop playing prematurely several seconds (or even minutes) before the end of the tune.  Playback jumps immediately to the beginning of the next tune. 
I noticed this, I believe, shortly after moving my iTunes library to a new iMac (3.1 GHz Intel Core i5, 12 GB memory) running iTunes 10.5.3 (3) on Mac OS 10.7.3.  Everything was fine before the move.
Of the 283 purchased songs in my iTunes library, about 100 of them exhibit this behavior.  The song playback times at which this happens range from 2:14 to 5:19.
What is interesting, is that tunes from the same album all end at the same playback time!  For example, I purchased the whole album “River - The Joni Letters” (Herbie Hancock’s album covering a number of Joni Mitchell tunes).  Every song from that album now stops playing at 3:39.  The same happens with other tunes that happen to be from the same album, too.  I have no idea why this would be the case, but it certainly seems significant.
Another interesting finding, is that if I copy one of tunes exhibiting this issue to the desktop and play it from there, the song plays all the way through to the end without a problem.  This would, I think, rule out a corrupt file and tend to point to iTunes itself as the source of the problem.
The problem certainly is annoying, and it would be great if we could find some resolution and get back to enjoying our music without the mind-jarring bump that too often now happens without warning.
Sincerely,
Michael Loomis