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

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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.

ITunes Freezes on determining gapless playback information

I really would like some help, I start iTunes up it starts to check the gapless playback information, then stops and I can't do anything more, except close it out. I have tried repairing it, I have tried uninstalling then reinstalling it, nothing seems to work. Does anyone have anything else I should try?

Wow..adding to this one and will post my own. I just bought an iPhone and discovered iTunes 9 now Locks up on "Determining Gapless Playback Information". iTunes 9 worked fine prior to this as was syncing with iTouch. While it locks up on one song "Analyzing 4 of 4: Boys Boys Boys" the screen for Welcome to Your new iPhone is up but it is already locked up. I don't want to have to un-install and possibly lose my iTouch sync info. Without the iPhone hooked up iTunes just seems to lock up right away and never gets tot he Determining Gapless Playback.

Everytime iTunes starts with "Determining Gapless Playback Information"!?

Hi,
for 7 weeks now everytime I start iTunes (12.1.0.71) it keeps saying "Determining Gapless Playback Information" and does it with the last 189 mp3-files I imported. The files are always the same, it does not happen to any other, older mp3-files and it does not happen to new m4a-files. I found some ideas in forums but all of the suggestions are outdated because iTunes 12.1.0.71 does not have the options mentioned anymore....
Any ideas?

Welcome to AD!
I'm not sure this will work, but it's what I would try on my PC.
I would rename the folders containing those new music albums to something else. Then itunes will not be able to find them, so should skip the determining gapless info for them.
Specifically, use Windows Explorer to rename the folder they are in from "Artist A" to "Artist A re-do"
I would also check to see if another player such as WMP could play them. They might be damaged files.

ITunes Freezes when determining gapless playback information

I have a library of about 10,000 songs stored on an external hard drive. I imported them all into iTunes, and then when it tries to determine gapless playback information, it always freezes. First it froze on one particular song that I removed. It went a little longer the next time but then froze on a different song. Is there anyway I can have it skip songs? Or is it freezing because of a different reason? I basically can't use iTunes because it freezes within 2 minutes of me opening it..

Welcome to AD!
I'm not sure this will work, but it's what I would try on my PC.
I would rename the folders containing those new music albums to something else. Then itunes will not be able to find them, so should skip the determining gapless info for them.
Specifically, use Windows Explorer to rename the folder they are in from "Artist A" to "Artist A re-do"
I would also check to see if another player such as WMP could play them. They might be damaged files.

Itunes hangs when determining gapless playback

I have just plugged my portable hard drive back into my laptop after a month, i have 15,997 songs in total (60.93 GB)on my hard drive but it now hangs whilst doing the initial analyzing - on 378 of 4518 track 03 and will not progress. I have the latest itunes & ipod software installed, and have done this on numerous occasions with no problem having had an ipod for 3 years and always stored my music files in a portable hard drive to prevent music loss if my laptop crashed. Please help me resolve this problem
thanks

I have the same problem but with grievous outcome: my entire machine hangs; I've done EVERYTHING I, and several product specialists can think of short of deleting my entire music collection.
I don't think it has anything to do with the name of a single track - it's hanging on different tracks for me with no consistency in naming styles. I've reinstalled iTunes several times, killed the cache, the preferences, tried it as a different user, deleted and rebuilt my library, and NOTHING helps. When iTunes comes up, it immediately goes into "Determining Gapless Playback..." and withing 2-3 songs the machine HANGS and has to be hard powered.
Of course, I've tried to set every song to a non-gapless song, tried to turn on or off song crossfade, no luck.
APPLE: Please listen and help!! Make gapless playback a removable option or something!

Issues with itunes error -50, determining gapless playback, missing speaker options, home sharing not working

In the last few weeks I have been experiencing multiple issues with my iTunes.
I believe it began when my itunes library corrupted and I had to start again.
By starting again I mean I went to previous itunes libraries and used the most recent backup.
After I noticed a large number of unknown error (-50) messages I thought I better copy the backup I was using from the previous libraries folder over to the itunes folder (in case the error related to failed attempts to back up the library).
This problem in itself wasn't too bad as I am able to close and relaunch iTunes and carry on however I have noticed some less desirable side effects - the loss of home sharing. I am unable to pick speakers to broadcast to (I have 2 airport express units plugged in and working and an Apple TV2) and I am unable to access the iTunes library on Apple TV.
I've done some basic troubleshooting: creating rules to allow the home sharing ports, temporarily disabling antivirus/firewall, uninstalling antivirus/firewall, setting up rules on the router for homesharing ports, uninstalling iTunes, rebooting, reinstalling iTunes and retrying, disabling home sharing and reenabling, disabling peerblock, deauthorising itunes and reauthorising and rebooting both the pc and Apple TV, checking sharing settings under preferences and verifying both the entire library is shared and that the status of home sharing is on but no devices connected, created a new library and reimporting my media and the problem still exists.
I noticed that occasionally when I switch between libraries, deauthorise and reauthorise I do get access to home sharing and Apple Tv gets full access to the library BUT iTunes quickly becomes unresponsive and when I close and relaunch Apple TV can no longer see my library or iTunes.
I have checked the network I am running on is marked as a home network, I have tried connecting the Apple TV via LAN instead of WiFi but this makes no difference. What I do find interesting is that I have iTunes running on another pc and on a virtual machine and as soon as I run either their libraries appear on Apple TV so there must be something about the installation on my pc and nothing wrong with the Apple TV, airport express, router etc.
With that in mind I retried an uninstall and this time deleted as many tmp files as I could see in the iTunes library folder, rebooted and reinstalled. I also checked the permission levels on the iTunes application folder and the iTunes library folder (located on an additional internal drive), I then tried running iTunes as an administrator (which my user account is already set as) but all the problems are still evident.
The determining gapless playback has no effect on how I use iTunes but it clearly does not need to run for every single recently added track any time I make a minute change to other library entries. I tried looking up one of the files it was determining gapless playback for but it wasn't corrupt or read only so I don't see why it needs to retry continually.
I'm running Windows 7 64bit with all latest updates installed and iTunes 64bit 10.6.3.25, all apple devices are running the latest version of firmware and I'm running out of ideas. I did try running CCleaner to clear up and registry issues if there were any and I ran Appcleaner to remove any iTunes cache that may have been left between installs. I'm running out of ideas - what am I missing here?

I have found the problem was in part caused by Windows firewall.
Exactly how Windows firewall can cause the problem when I wasn't even using it I don't know.
What I do know is that when I checked 'allow a program through the firewall' I found 4 rules set for iTunes, one of which was public network access.
I deleted the superfluous rules and the Home Sharing problems are solved.
All that needs sorting now is the 'determining gapless playback'.

Help ! ITunes crashes everytime on gapless playback information

Please, i don't know what to to. Everytime I open Itunes it says gapless playback information and goes on forever, it won't let me import a cd . It just crashes. It's version 7 the latest one. It didn't happen before until the upgrade
how can i stop that gapless playback information from apperaing everytime??
Windows XP

Hey, guess what...I fixed it!
It appears to be that when iTunes updated to the 7.1 version, you needed the newest version of quicktime to be running and fully installed.
For example. I had the K-Lite Mega Codec pack, which in it contains a quick time alternative codec which allows you to watch .mov or quicktime movies without having quicktime actually installed on your computer.
So I completely removed the K-Lite Mega Codec pack and rebooted, then completely installed iTunes 7.1 + quicktime, and then rebooted again to be safe. And it worked. I also installed the K-Lite Mega Codec pack later and excluded the quicktime alternative.
But if you dont have the K-Lite Mega Codec pack on your computer I suggest uninstalling quicktime, and reinstalling it, then install iTunes 7.1 all over again.
Does this help you? If you have anymore questions just ask sophie.
Best wishes,
Oakie

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.

FIX - iTunes Crash while "Determining Song Volume"

I figured out how to make iTunes stop crashing on "Determining Song Volume". This may not fix it for everybody, but if you have a Dual-Core processor, it's worth a try.
iTunes' SoundCheck scanning process (aka determining song volume) is not fully thread-safe. When it's trying to scan several songs, it launches each one in a separate thread. On a dual-core or dual-processor machine, this means that the scans happen simultaneously. My guess is that the decoding/scanning is perfectly fine, but the bit where it's writing the updated information into iTunes database is not. And so it eventually hits a case where both threads try to write at the same instant and bam, crash. Probably because a lack of mutex locking on the database routines.
Anyway, if you're experiencing this problem, and have dual-cores, try this:
1. Start iTunes. If it starts scanning immediately, hit the X icon to the right of where it says "determining song volume" to make it stop and not crash.
2. Go to preferences and turn off SoundCheck. Also turn off "Use soundcheck when burning CDs" or something like that.
3. Open the Task Manager (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC). Click the Processes Tab.
4. Right click on the iTunes.exe process, and select "Set Affinity..."
5. You should have checkmarks beside CPU0 and CPU1. Turn off the CPU1 checkmark.
6. Back in iTunes, turn on SoundCheck again. It'll start determining song volume, and this time, it should not crash.
If this works for you, then you can make it semi-permanent with this little program: http://www.activeplus.com/us/freeware/runfirst/
It's called RunFirst.exe and what you do is to put a copy of it in the iTunes directory. Then change the shortcut you use to start iTunes to have the full path to runfirst.exe followed by the normal path to iTunes.exe. SO change the shortcut's properties to look like this:
"C:\Program Files\iTunes\RunFirst.exe" "C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe"
This makes the shortcut launch RunFirst, which launches iTunes with the CPU Affinity forced to one core only.
That should fix it for a lot of people. It worked for me. So enjoy!
Apple can fix this in future revisions of iTunes, if somebody tells them to check that all the bits are totally thread-safe, because clearly that's where the issue lies.

Sarah: Sound Check (and other volume leveling schemes) usually do lower the volume. There's lot of good technical reasons for this, but the basic gist of it is that songs which are too loud cause distortion. If you want louder music, your best bet is to leave the Sound Check on and crack up the volume knob on the speakers instead. Most audio sources are actually too loud to begin with, because people think loud = better, but this ruins the dynamic range and you don't get the full effect of the audio. CD's really would sound just as good as live performances if it were not for this.
Sound Check doesn't actually change the song's volume itself. It just inserts a tag saying what the volume of the song is. On playback, the volume is auto adjusted to conform to an optimum level. ReplayGain works in much the same way, but it is much more precise. But anyway, turning off the Sound Check option really does turn the effect off. Sound Check doesn't permenantly change the music to begin with.
My suggestion is to not use the volume slider on the computer, but to leave Sound Check on, and to instead simply turn up the volume on the speakers. Using the speaker volume won't distort the music in the same way that using a volume slider on the computer will. I could explain why, but it's really technical, having to do with amps and dynamic range and so forth. You're probably not that interested.
But if you are interested, go over to the HydrogenAudio forums and start reading. More technical gibberish there than you can shake a stick at.

ITunes Crashes While Looking Up CD Info

I have two Macs, a MacBook and a Mac Pro. Both are running 10.5.4 and iTunes 7.7.1. The systems are all up to date and nearly identical. Except. The MacBook rips CDs without any problem. The Mac Pro has iTunes crash EVERY SINGLE TIME it looks up a CD via gracenote. BUT, when you relaunch iTunes, it then remembers that CD it crashed while looking up. So it does find and store the data, then immediately crashes.
So how can I fix this? I already reinstalled the app, delete the iTunes music folder, deleted all of the iTunes prefs files, and even deleted the app and copied it over from the MacBook. Nothing helped. It still crashes every single time.

How did you figure it out. Sounds similar to my situation as follows:
I have a CD ripping problem on my 6 month old iMac. After a varying number of normal rips, iTunes appears to be hanging up between recognizing the CD and going out to CDDB for lookup data. The CD will show as an audio CD on the desktop, will appear in iTunes devices section on the right, flash a CD track list window and then disappear from iTunes and the desk top thereby leaving no indication that there’s a CD in the drive. Ejecting from the keyboard usually works and then reinserting the CD a 2nd time works for a while. Again after a varying number of CDs it becomes necessary to restart the iMac. Setting iTunes to just show or rip and eject or anything in between the CD has no effect.
We took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple store, but apparently all the Geniuses were out of the store. Our sub-genius guy apparently wasn’t able to process customer input. Multiple attempts were made to explain that reinserting the same CD after a successful read a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 10,000th time NEVER FAILED. He proceeded, un-swayed, to insert his “test” CD (he knowingly said there were music files on it, oohhh! ahhhh!) 10 times and proclaimed that the drive was OK. This despite my wife and I had the foresight to bring an armload of CDs the Mac hadn’t been introduced to. As a 52 year old electrical engineer that has programmed and trouble shot numerous control systems over the last 33 years I find it always makes me feel better when customer care types talk to me like I’m 6.
He offered to reinstall the operating system if we wanted to bring it back because the store was closing. The whole point of switching to Mac was stability, unsurpassed integration between apps and hopefully having somewhat more elegant solutions available than reinstalling the entire operating system. If I wanted to reinstall Windows in the vain hope it would do more good than harm to solve my computer problems I would still be running a PC and be $2500 ahead.
It seems I can prolong the onset of the problem if no other applications that use the Internet are open. We are running DSL to a Time Capsule 1 foot away from the iMac. The Mac connects to the time capsule via wifi. OS X and iTunes are up-to-date. We have no other problems with this computer what-so-ever.
Has anybody else run into this problem?

ITune crashes while determining song volume

After I told iTune to import new songs, it started to determine the song volume. After about 300 or so songs (out of about 2000) it just crashes and ask me to send a report. When I restart it it just starts to determine the song volumes and crashes again after about the same number of songs. Any suggestions how to correct this problem?

Well, yes, as Spock says, "Live Long and Prosper!.
Using Spotlight, I tracked down anything that vaguely had to do with iTunes, everywhere I could find them and mercilessly deleted them. I also renamed the iTunes Music Folder and moved it to the desktop. I then took my 'old" iLife 6 CD and reinstalled everything. I refused any updates. I then opened iTunes, in preferences/playback I made sure Sound Check was checked and then clicked "add to library and added chunks of about 100 to 250 songs at a time until I got them all in. There were no problems. I suspect that some buffer get overloaded.
Nick

ITunes crashed while importing, cd playback messed up

Well my problem is that I was importing a CD and on the second song form the CD, iTunes froze up for a while, then crashed. Now my CDs play but its slowed down and when its playing a CD the any type of sound from my computer has that warped effect to it. CDs play fine on windows media player. Re-Installed iTunes, I ran the diagnostics and said that the TOC failed. Any suggestions?

no suggestions?

HELP! Stcuk while "determining gapless playback information"...

I installed v7 and launched it. While going through my library to scan for gapless information (or whatever) it hangs... I've tried restarting my computer and it doesn't seem to help. It always gets stuck 174 tracks into the 4000 that I have.
All my music is on an external drive. Could this have anything to do with anything?!
Please help!!!

This is the "iTUnes for windows" forum, If your doing this on a mac, you may get better help in the "iTUnes for mac" forums

Itunes crashes while determining gapless playback info

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