ITunes seems to be skipping/hiccuping while playing music during browisng.

Question

Hello Everyone
So for the past month or so I experience intermittent "hiccuping" while playing music through iTunes on my PC.  Songs don't skip in the traditional sense of skipping from one song to the next ... instead it's more like a blurp/drag.  It lasts for about a second or two and then it stops.  It happens mostly when I'm web-browsing.  I've tried using another browser but nothing seems to help.  my PC is three years old and it came with Windows 7.  I've used Windows 8 since it became available so I guess that's about two years now, I'm on to Windows 8.1.  My system has a 1TB hard drive, 4 GB of RAM, and an AMD Athlon X4 640 3GHZ processor (I don't know much about processor specs but I thought I'd include it to be as thorough as possible).  Of the TB of Hard Drive space, I've used less than 40% of it.  I've run virus scans, malware scans, I've made sure my defrags and Windows updates are up to date.  There was recently an update to iTunes in the last day or so - and I was really hoping this would be fixed - but the problem seems to be getting worse. 
I'm to the point where I'm ready to download Google Play and just use iTunes solely for syncing my iPhone 5s.  I cannot continue to put with playing music in iTunes with this problem.  I'm at my wit's end.  I've considered "dumping" everything on to an external hard drive, wiping my system and starting fresh ...
Anyone have any thoughts, ideas?

Answer 1

It may just be your DVD player. I have found
this
with some of my DVDs. They work fine on my player
and
skip on others.
That results from a high level of burn errors as a
result of low quality media and/or high burn
speeds.
Hmm, maybe. I never (knowingly) use crappy media.
I always use Imation discs (mainly because they are
fully printable - and I thought they were meant to be
good quality). Also, I cant see where to change the
burn speed. I always burn a disc image and then use
Disk Utility to burn a disc. It just does it
automatically and doesn't seem to offer any choices.
How can I get it to burn at slower speed? I'd
prefer not to use third party software if poss.
OK, you've got me worried now.
I've just checked this
http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm
and think I'll be off tomorrow to buy some new discs.
Thanks for alerting me.
Leanne