Gapless playback info

can anyone tell me why every time i update my ipod lately, after it updates any new songs/videos/whatever, then it says "analyzing gapless playback information"? like, what does that mean? and every single time, its for the same exact 67 songs... not like its affecting me or anything, but it kinda takes a while and i was just curious what that means exactly..?

The real questions are these:
Why is the iPod database so brittle that the slightest thing makes you have to redo the whole thing? This is the same problem with Album Artwork. You mount the iPod wrong or view it with another program and Poof!, no more album art.
and...
Why couldn't the gapless option just get embedded into the file? Just make it a comment tag or something. Then it doesn't have to be scanned time after time.
and...
Why can't we just turn it OFF!?

Similar Messages

STOP "determining gapless playback info": how to get rid of it?

I have itunes 7 with macbookpro and 80 gigs of music on an external hard drive connected through USB to my Airpot Extreme 802.11n base.
I CANNOT USE itunes because it is endlessly "determining gapless playback info" (i'm using the French version who says "détermination des données de lecture sans intervalle")
though I DON'T NEED IT. This is the option that allow albums to play gapless... no such an improvement for a so slow process!
This morning it treated 200 songs in 5 hours... it has been one week i'm letting it work times to times but with this rhythm I still have to wait 350 hours = more than 15 days 24/24... without speaking of the extremely frequent cases when I have to "force to quit" and restard itunes.....
I CAN'T BEAR THAT ANYMORE... IS ALL THAT REALLY NECESSARY?
I cannot imagine this option cannot be unactivated... so please if someone can tell me how to get rid of this "determining gapless playback info" thing... I would be very happy...
Many thanks for your answer!

I'm having the exact same issue. I have a 802.11n Airport Extreme that has my 100 GB music library connected to it via the USB port, and my iTunes (on my MacBook Pro) connects to it via the Airport Disk. Each time I add a batch of new songs to the library, it takes for ever for iTunes to resolve the gapless information. I just added 30 tracks, and it took about 10 to 15 minutes, during which iTunes was completely inaccessible with the spinning beach ball.
My theory is that to determine gapless information, iTunes has to load each track into memory to analyze it. That goes by quick if the libary is direct connected, but over the network that can be a pain (especially if the mp3s are large).
I really wish Apple would make this feature "toggle-able" on a future release of iTunes.

Itunes freezes - strange error message - Determining gapless playback info

I recently tried to suscribe to a new podcast and the accidently stopped the downlaod before it was finished. Itunes then locked up and i could not get out of the podcast listing.
I closed itunes using ctrl-alt-del and started started again. this time it still went directly to the podcast page and the window on top had the following message: Determining Gapless Playback Information. Analysing XX of YY. As it was counting, the computer froze again. I notice that the CPU usage was up to 100%. Everytime I go on to itunes it does the same.
I removed itunes, cleaned out the temp directory, etc. and reinstalled again - same problem.
Has anyone seen this and can you help me?

Ok - no one seems to be able to help with my problem - is there a way I can go back to an older version of itunes. I have 6.5.0 on a CD, but when I remove version 7.0.2 and install 6.5.0, I get a message that says my library was created with a new version of itunes.

Is there anyway to edit gapless playback info in iTunes 11?

I know that one of the many bizzare and ridiculous changes in iTunes 11 is that they removed gapless playback options, which I just REALLY can't understand why they'd do.
So I'm just wondering if there is any way through something 3rd party or anything that I can edit gapless playback settings?
Thanks in advance!

Contact the iTunes Store staff.
(58003)

Determining Gapless playback Info Trouble

I upgraded from itunes v6 to v7, it loaded fine but with the new version(v7) it automatically starts to scan my music list (about 13,000 songs)and it says "determing gapless playback information" it starts making its way through my song list fine but everything freezes on song #3325 every time so it can not do what it wants to do and I can not use itunes at all. I have to shut down my pc using the reboot button (logical switch)and once I click on the itunes icon up pops itunes v7 and it starts to scan my music list over again saying "determing gapless playback information" and freezes again, and again, and again, etc. Anyone got any ideas, not to computer savy but will do what I have to do to be able to use itunes again. Many thanks.
Vuda

It has happened on many songs, and I have tried deleting them, and allowing iTunes to format the rest of the songs, however it keeps on happening. And yes I have tried cancelling the gapless playback before it gets to that point, however it's now the first song it determine's that makes it freeze, so as soon as iTunes opens, it freezes. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes 7, this doesn't help either.

Itunes crashes while determining gapless playback info

I had this problem with itunes 7 and now with 8 and its driving me crazy.
OK i have had no issues up till a few days ago. I was listening to a podcast and it had like 9 minutes to go and it froze up itunes started having the spinning beachball and it took 5 minutes before i could even get the force quit menu to come up so i could get out of itunes.
Then i reopened it and it said my libary was not an itunes libary so it began building one and it got half way though and it said determining gapless playback for sony 300 of whatever and it kept going it started slowing down then it picked up again then it froze. I saw which song it froze on so once i get itunes to quit i found the song and took it out. It sstarted up and this time froze on the song before it.
So i took out everything started a blank library and added songs one folder at a time and it got part way done but then at some point it freezes up and then every since this issue with itunes now when im typing in safari or firefox if i type to fast i get the spinning beach ball and i have to wait about 10 seconds to type again.

I am experiencing the same problem. My itunes used to freeze after several seconds of being open because certain songs would jam it on the gapless playback. However I would "X" out of this and the program would work fine. However, the first song it checks now for gampless playback jams it and as soon as i open itunes, it freezes. It does not even show that it is processing the gapless playback in the upper window. My computer also makes a "weird noise:" the hard drive turns intensely to a beat: -- -- ---- (pause of about 2 seconds) -- -- ----. I have tried reinstalling itunes, which did not work.
Mac OS X (10.3.9) 12in Powerbook 1.33 ghz

Ipod 4th gen! - stuck determing gapless playback info.- why?

After several restores trying to get my ipod 4th gen. click wheel going (after installing iTunes 7 and the ipod becoming extremely buggy afterwards...) running diagnostic tests, etc., it turns out that the problem seems to be that every time I plug the ipod into my computer iTunes 7 tells me its "determing gapless playback information" which takes forever.
Of course, I thought that this gapless feature was only for newer iPod models so I'm puzzled why iTunes is doing this for my older model? Also it seems to have broken the playback when using the iPod - playback drops out in the middle of songs for instance.
I've now installed Linux on my iPod and Podzilla is playing back my files just fine, when I try with Apple's software - totally broken and disappointing.
Anybody know what's up? Are we waiting for Apple to release a fix for this? Why is my 4th Gen. apparently attempting the gapless playback?
powerbook g4 1.33 gHz, 12" Mac OS X (10.4.7)

his is not operating system-specific, but I want to get it on the record somewhere since I could not find the solution anywhere else.
Last week, my third-generation 30GB iPod refused to go beyond the Apple logo on startup. It would power up, flash as if trying to go to the menu, but instead it would just show the Apple again. I tried all the usual recovery methods: resetting (hundreds of times and a couple of different ways), disk scans from the diagnostic menu, restoring with the latest iPod software and with an older version, fsck, using Disk Utility to repair and erase, Disk Warrior, letting the battery drain, everything.
Nothing worked ... until I used Disk Utility to reformat the disk with the "Zero Out Data" option (in the Security pop-up) enabled. This, apparently, reformatted the drive in such a way as to account for bad sectors. It took about an hour.
After that, I restored it with the latest iPod software, and to my delight, it booted normally. It now works fine.
Found that on web mite help you.... but i dont have a mac

Stuck itunes due to gapless playback information

Hi everyone- I always get good answers here so hopefully someone will be able to help with my dilemma!
This past week my computer was acting up, but it seemed to repair itself. Just things like Mail forgetting my password, Safari closing by itself, that sort of thing. But the one lingering problem was with my iTunes. When I clicked to open it it had erased all of my playlists, and it was only recognizing about 1,400 of my songs. I called apple, and they had me delete the .xml file and the data file from my iTunes. Then I added my library back in.
I've got about 5,000 songs so it took forever. When it finally added all the songs it got stuck on retreiving album artwork. I let it go for about twenty minutes, and had to force quit it. Tried the enrtire process all over again, and again it got stuck on the same artwork.
From there I just restarted. Now when I opened iTunes it got stuck after about 100 songs in the "determining gapless playback info" mode. It gets so stuck that I can't even force quit it- I have to press down the power button and let it restart that way.
Called apple, and they couldn't figure it out. I tried creating another account to see if I could add the music from my account and see if I got the same error. But I couldn't get to my music from there. I also tried deleting the album that was giving me issues and it just paused on a different album.
I am lost! I have no time this week to take it to the Genius Bar, and I'm leaving for vacation in a week so I really want to sync my iPod. Any help would be appreciated!
Thank you!
Mac Book Pro Mac OS X (10.4.9)

The problem occurs when you are importing tracks from another drive than the boot drive. It's a bug in iTunes or OS X. I've had two machines do it, and there is no way to remedy it, and never any response here on the board when it is mentioned. Apple please fix it!

Gapless playback information

sometimes it does it, but only when i dont want it to and then it slows down itunes completely but when im going to be away for awhile, i dont know how to make it run the scan to do the gapless playback info scan, does anyone know how?

If you wait long enough, once it has finally gone through everything on your PC and your iPod, it will not do it again. But it may take forever until that's complete.

Determining Gapless Playback Information....

Ever since I downloaded iTunes 7, every now and then iTunes is analyzing my ipod by " Determining Gapless Plabyback Information ". Yet its only doing this on half of my music. It takes forever and it slows down my computer. Is there any way to shut this off or is it better just to leave it alone?
G4 and emac Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Look in the little window where it says its determining gapless playback info, there should be a little x inside of a black circle, click that and it will stop, but it will keep doing this every time you sync until it checks every song. It does take a while, I suggest just syncing it before you go to bed and let it do its thing while you sleep.

Determining volume/gapless playback freezes iTunes when using NAS

I finally copied my CD collection onto a NAS/Squeezebox Server but after adding it to my library iTunes freezes trying to determine the volume and gapless playback info. The only thing I use iTunes for is moving songs onto my iPhone so I don't care about gapless playlists or the relative volume.
I've seen this issue in numerous other posts but none of the solutions have worked for me. I've tried to turn off Soundcheck in both properties and the burn menus but it doesn't help.
Any help would be appreciated.

Can you see which song iTunes is hanging on? If you can, before opening iTunes, delete (or move it) from the iTunes music directory. It may be corrupt and causing all your problems.

Hanging when "Determining Gapless Playback"

Hi everyone,
I'm having a slight problem when my 80Gb is syncing with iTunes 7.0. When updating and "Determining Gapless Playback" iTunes will pause every hundred or so songs and tell me that the update is complete, but it hasn't worked it's way through all of the songs and the update symbol is still active next to the device icon. To remedy this I have to right click on the device icon and tell iTunes to sync. It starts up where it left off and stops again in about one hundred songs. This means I have to sit at my computer while it is updating. Any ideas for a fix besides reinstalling iTunes and having to recreate all of my playlists?
Thanks in advance!
Steve

I'm having the same issue on a gen 1 MacBook (2 GHz Intel, 2 GB of ram). I only have about 1000 songs in iTunes which are stored on an external drive that is connected to my Airport Extreme via USB. It's super super slow when determining the gapless playback info. Airport Disk Utility seems to be broken, it does not recognize any of my external disks. Finder however does see them and I can set it to automount in the login options for my user, which is cool. I haven't tried directly connecting the disk to the laptop to determine the gapless playback info. I will do that and post the results.

Computer freezes before gapless playback is finished

I just upgraded to Itunes 7.0. After restarting my computer and opening itunes it starts the gapless playback scan. It stops at the same song and freezes my computer. I have tried this 3 times and it stops at the same song and I have to reboot in order to unfreeze my computer. Do I need to delete that song and try or is there any other way around this? Thanks

I have recently updated to the new iTunes 7 as well. I have about 38000 songs on an external firewire HD.
iTunes opens and immediately starts "Determining Gapless Playback Info".
My problem is that it is going to take about 3 months for iTunes to get through my entire library.
I let it run for about 2 days straight without messing with it.. and it only made it through about 670 songs... and is still going through this crazy process...
I understand the benifits... but I'll never see my machine get used again if this keeps up.. I can't go this long.
I need a way to either speed up this process or shut IT OFF...
Please help..
Thanks

IOS Music Player MP3 Gapless Playback Problem

Hi,
I've been having this gapless playback issue on iOS now for the past few years, since at least iOS 6 if I can remember correctly. The number one reason I use an iPhone and iOS devices is for gapless playback in the iOS music player. For the last few years I've been experiencing a bug with the stock iOS music player on my iPhone 4S using iOS 6 and on my iPhone 5 using iOS 6 & 7, and currently on my new iPhone 6 running iOS 8.1.2. This only happens on my iPhones and using iOS, this bug is not found when I use my iPod classic or when playing the same albums through iTunes.
I thought it might have been spotted by other iOS users and fixed in iOS 7.1 or at least the current version of iOS 8, but instead it's gotten worse, albums that used to play smoothly between transitions now suddenly pause and jump for a split second when changing from track to track.
What's happening is, I listen to a lot of albums that are continuously DJ mixed and play straight through without any pauses between tracks, and I've been experiencing problems a lot now with random split second pauses between tracks and choppy transitions. These albums in question have been ripped from cd using the latest versions of iTunes.
For example,
I'd be listening to an album and it would play gapless and smooth for most of the album, but maybe one or two transitions on the album would have a split second pause between them, and the rest of the album would play perfectly with no pauses, skips or jumps at all.
This only happens on my iPhone, as I have a 160gb iPod classic and I've listened to all the same albums on it and never has a problem playing the album without any pauses, every album plays 100% smooth and gapless on it.
I mailed Apple about it through their feedback page on their site... https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
Hoping that they would take note of this and try and look into it and fix the issue. That was probably about a year ago now, never got fixed or got any confirmation back from them about this problem. Then last August, I'd had enough and contacted Apple support to notify them about this issue. They told me the usual story, "have you tried restoring the phone?", which I obliged and did. The problem was there on a freshly restored iPhone 5.
So they told me that they would put me in touch with someone higher in Apple to take the case further, "great" I thought.
I spoke with a senior care advisor and explained the problem and agreed to send detailed explanations of the issue and test files too so that they could hopefully hear what I was talking about. But after a few weeks of going back and forward, I finally got them to hear the issue with the random pauses, the first week they denied there was a problem and said the files played ok on their test iOS devices, so I myself tried the files on another iOS device and the same problem was there.
The last correspondence I had with the Apple care advisor was back in the end of August / start of September, and she told me that they spotted the issue and was told by the tech's that it would be fixed in a future update, I never got a when this would happen, I was just told to make sure my iOS device was up to date with the latest version of iOS. I couldn't speak to an actual technician, got no follow up support, just a vague "We'll look into it." Case Closed.
I got so sick of this problem that I sold my iPhone and iPad just after this last phone call with the Apple people, and switched over to Android. I'd being reading up on gapless playback music players and found out that there's a good few available for Android devices. I got myself a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, twice as powerful as the iPhone 6 and half the price. I was using that for the last few months, and playing my music through Neutron Music Player app which is a great music player which plays gapless 100%
But I couldn't really take to Android OS, seeing as I've been using Apple products for around 10 years now and iOS since the iPhone 3G. So I decided to contact Apple again and see if they'd fixed the music player issue in iOS yet.
I wrote a long email explaining the problem, how it wasn't really looked at properly, and how I was a long time Apple customer and had to resort to switching over to Android because the basic music player functions on iOS devices have bugs. I took a chance in mailing this to Tim Cook's offices, I knew he wouldn't reply personally, just thought that it might get read by someone in his offices with a bit more say in the matter.
Just before Xmas, I got a call from someone from executive relations from my local Apple offices about this. He seemed nice and was aware of the problem from reading back through my emails and previous case notes from August when I opened this case originally.
We had a talk and he said he would get one of the tech's to call me too about this so that I could explain the bugs to someone more knowledgeable about iOS.
A few days later I received a call from one of the tech's at Apple and was chatting to him, explaining the problem. His response was that he thinks Apple doesn't support gapless playback on current iOS devices. From looking at the gapless playback information page on the Apple support site below, it looks like it hasn't been updated to show any iPhone models after the iPhone 3GS... http://support.apple.com/en-ie/HT201644
I was trying to explain to him how ridiculous this sounded, why would Apple stop supporting basic functions on their music player on iOS devices? It makes no sense at all? You can see that the amount of hardware devices and software that supports gapless playback today... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback#Player_support
He couldn't explain either, he just said that because it's not listed there on the Apple support page.
Then the next day I got the follow up call from the Apple executive relations guy, he was stating that he was speaking to the tech guy that called me and it looks like Apple doesn't support gapless playback anymore, from looking at the documentation on site.
I told him how stupid this was, and how lots of music players have gapless playback as standard today. And if they don't support it now, then why does it play through some parts of the albums on iOS ok and then just randomly pause, or have jumpy / choppy transitions on the rest of the album. If it was the case, no albums would play gaplessly at all, it would be like when the first ever iPod's were released back in the day with no gapless playback and would pause for a split second between every transition.
He couldn't give me an answer and said that maybe down the line they would start supporting it again, and that I should request the feature to be added to future iOS versions via the iPhone feedback page... https://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
He just kept on emphasising that it was "NOT A BUG OR ISSUE", trying to cover up the problem because the info on the site wasn't updated to show the current iOS devices. Which in itself is wrong, looking at the page it says "Supported iPod and iPhone models (make sure you have the latest iPod or iPhone software)"
iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS only go up to iOS 6, so that contradicts itself when the latest version is iOS 8.
The info is out of date and needs to be updated. So in August I was told, "we found the issue and will look into it" and a few months later, "it's not an issue", what's a cop out.
I was annoyed and taken back by this response, and really found it hard to believe that this was the case, Apple stopping supporting their music player on iOS devices. Seeing as iTunes plays everything smoothly and no gapless issues. I just went out and bought an iPhone 6 for €900 / $1060, and for that money you'd expect it's basic music player to work. It's total BS to think that a top computer software / hardware company would just decide to abandon basic functions in their devices, especially when we are talking about how much Apple takes pride in their products and how much more they charge for them over their competitors.
So this is my next step to try and get this problem seen and out in the open more. The more people who know about it and are aware of the issue, the better.
Hopefully more people can get the word around and get this noticed by Apple and finally fixed.
I've uploaded some test files below to show the problem. The files are mp3's and aac, and have been ripped from cd using the latest version of iTunes. The mp3's are the ones with the issue, but the aac play with no problem. If you listen to the transition at the end of track 2 (2-02 Colours (JH Re-Edit)) going into the start of track 3 (2-03 Your Body), you will notice the split second pause / jump. But listen to the aac version and compare it to the mp3 version and you will hear that it plays back fine, just as it's supposed to. Try them in iTunes too and both versions playback fine, no jumps or pauses.
You can download them here, all links have the same files, I just uploaded them to different hosts for other people's choosing...
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=86512332626247919914
https://www.mediafire.com/?w5wvi50er96b14s
http://www42.zippyshare.com/v/37047710/file.html
https://www.sendspace.com/file/lubcmc
More files can be provided if needed to show the problem happening on various other albums.
I really hope that people can spot this issue too and help get this fixed, I know this gapless playback feature might not be important to some people, but like I said at the start, it's an essential function for me in a music player and I use it on a daily basis when I listen to music.
Thanks for reading this long rant of mine, appreciate it.
Ger

I believe this issue occurs only between songs that iTunes has converted to a lower bitrate for you during transfer to your iOS device and songs that it has not done this for. Take this Between the Buried and Me album, for instance. I have marked all of the transitions that should have been gapless but probably aren't in red. I know for sure that most of these marked transitions are indeed broken and that the most of the transitions not marked in red work flawlessly... I honestly can't remember whether or not some of these transitions were gapless or not, but the many transitions I do remember working or not working match up exactly with whether or not the songs on either side of the transition were also on other sides of the 256kbps threshold, the threshold at which I enabled iTunes to convert tracks to 256kbps AAC.
I'm going to try re-sync'ing my library with that "feature" disabled and see if it fixes my gapless playback problem. Will post the results once I test it out.

How do I stop Determining Gapless Playback?

Yet again, another iTunes upgrade has caused the horrible gapless playback scan to occur on my iTunes library. As a result, iTunes is totally unresponsive until this action completes. In my case, it's really slow as I'm accessing my files wirelessly from a network drive. I have to keep canceling the rescan to use iTunes. For the most part it keeps track of where it left off, however some files keep getting rescanned.
Here's what I've observed so far (not that it solves anything)
- it appears that rescans are triggered whenever an upgrade rebuilds the library. After going through this once for iTunes 7 upgrade, I remember it occurring again for 8 (and probably a point release in between) and version 9.
- The gapless playback mp3 tag doesn't seem to stop the rescan from occurring. I tested this for files that kept getting rescanned. I first set them to No and they still got scanned. Next I set them to Yes and still no luck...
- The number of files being scanned are less than the total number of files currently in my library, which leads me to believe the rescan trigger has to do with either when the file was added (i.e. before iTunes 7 release) or based on what version of iTunes the file was created.
Based on the above, I think this is a bug as it should only go through this once and if needed when new files are added to iTunes. Better yet, there should be an option to shut this off completely!
Any info on what causes this to occur or how to make it stop would be greatly appreciated!!!

Yes, with previous upgrades, I had to let it run it's course (usually overnight). However, this still doesn't really answer my question.
If the scan isn't used to auto update the gapless flag, then in my option it's completely useless and renders iTunes unusable until the process completes or is cancelled by the user.
(1) What does the scan actually do??
(2) Why does it reoccur after every major upgrade??
(3) Why does the rescan only occur on a subset of the songs in the iTunes library??
I'm convinced this is a bug and iTunes is hard coded to scan for gapless playback on files added prior to the iTunes 7 release date, which per Wiki was on 9/12/06. If I create a smart playlist of songs added before this date, then the total number of songs in the list is nearly identical to the number of songs that are scanned after a major upgrade.

Gapless playback info

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