Skipping/Stuttering on music playback

Question

Since upgrading to iTunes 6, music playback has become completely unusable -- everything I play stutters or skips repepepepeeatedly. I've set Quicktime to safe, checked my drivers, defragged by disk, all to no effect. I don't want to abandon iTunes for playback (not least because it will take hours to change all the .AAC files to .MP3, and I'll lose everything I've bought from the music store). How do I fix this -- failing all else, is it possible to go back to version 5, which worked fine?

Answer 1

I've managed to solve this by winding down the
"Sample Rate Conversion Quality" under "Advanced
Audio Properties" (Control Panel | Sounds and Audio
Device Settings | Volume | Advanced) to its lowest
setting ("Good"!). I don't know what that actually
does, but the audio quality still seems fine to me,
and no stuttering.
What that actually does is force KMixer to use linear interpolation in its resampling instead of high-end multipoint interpolation.
If you don't get that, then what it does on most machines is to make the audio sound like total crap.
Hey, if it works for you, then it works for you, but I would only consider this to be a last resort. The fact that this actually worked for you tends to indicate that you either have a crap soundcard, or that you have crap drivers for your crap soundcard. Updating your audio drivers might be beneficial, and replacing the soundcard with one that doesn't require KMixer to resample normal 44.1khz input would definitely be beneficial.