Itunes is stuttering -starts and stops at random intervals

Question

Hi there-
I have a 5yr old emac. I am running OSX 10.4.8 and itunes 7.02. I have not had any problems for 5 years,
Today my itunes started stuttering - it starts and stops at random intervals and it takes forever to start playing again, to shuffle songs, etc... I restarted and it did not help.
Can you advise me on what I could do next?
Thanks so much,
Kathleen in Minneapolis

Answer 1

Kathleen ~
It's possible it could be one of several or combination of many things. I'll list the potential problems, and ways to determine if you have the problem.
First off, restart and do not run any other applications when you run iTunes, and don't run any applications after iTunes is playing music? Does the problem go away? If so, you may not have enough physical RAM installed on your computer for uninterrupted playback. You can find out how much RAM you have installed by clicking on the blue apple icon in the upper left corner of your screen and selecting "About this Mac". The "Memory" line wil display how much physical RAM you have installed. If it is less than 512MB, you should consider getting more.
My second assumption is that you state you have had the computer for 5 years, it is posible that the hard drive (HD) is getting low on available space. Adding music, email, pictures, downloads, etc. over time erodes away at the available space on your HD. Typically on this vintage computer it likes to have at least 20% of HD free space to work relatively efficiently (this will vary based upon how large your HD is to begin with).
To find out how much HD space you have available, click on your HD icon on your desktop once, then press and hold the CMD (open Apple) key and press the "i" key. You will see two statistics, "Capacity:" and "Available:". If the amount of available space is less than 20% of your total HD space you may want to consider removing things from you HD, acchiving things, or optimizing you HD.
How often you repair permissions? I recommend at least once a month, and it's relatively easy and a quick thing to do. Go to your Applications->Utilities folder on your HD. There is an application called "Disk Utility", double click it. Select your HD volume in the upper left corner, then click the button "Repair Disk Permissions". Depending upon how many programs you have loaded this could take several minutes, be patient. When finished, if it fixed any permissions, run it again! Yep, twice, just to be certain, it can never hurt.
Also, while you're in that application, and done with repairing permissions, click the "Verify Disk" button. This may also take several minutes. When done it should report if it thinks your drive is ok, or not. If not, you need to repair it, and in order to do so, you need to boot from another drive (either another physical or logical drive), so that you can attempt to repair it.
If you have the purchased utilities such as Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro you can repair disk and directory problems, which could also be causing your problems. A free utility, such as Tiger Cache Cleaner has some utilities to clean caches, and run your nightly, weekly, and monthly processes that may also need to be run.
Chuck
PB Ti 1GHz - The last of it's kind Mac OS X (10.4.8) et al