Songs randomly stopping in itunes & itunes continuously determining gapless playback problems

Question

I'm running itunes 11.1.4 on a macbook pro with mavericks (and have been since mavericks has come out), and over the past week, I've been running into two problems while importing new music into my itunes. 
First, certain songs will randomly stop while playing and immediately go to the next song. It seems to be happening to files that are regular mp3 files.  If I convert a flac file to mp3 and then add them to my itunes, they seem to play fine. I have also went into my itunes folder and played multiple songs that I've had these stopping issues with through my VLC and Quicktime players, and have had no playback issues while running them with VLC or Quicktime.
I should also add that under my itunes' advance preferences, I have "keep itunes folder organized" and "copy files to itunes media folder when adding to library" checked, so I assume that these files that I am choosing (control/click, "open with" VLC or Quicktime Player) to play through VLC or Quicktime are the exact same that my itunes is using when I select them within the itunes application.
I have checked the start and stop times, and they all show start 0:00 and then it's appropriate stop time.  For example, my entire Eric Clapton collection will abruptly stop at 1:33. If I scrub past that point, the songs will play. But if they're left to hit 1:33 on their own, they stop and then the next song starts.
At first I was thinking that these were corrupted files, but this has been happening a lot, to a lot of different files, so I'm thinking this is some sort of playback issue through itunes.
My other problem, which I've started to notice only over the past week or so, is that itunes is continuously "determining gapless playback" over a group of about 1300 songs or so (give or take a few, that's roughly the amount of songs it says that it's running through).  This will happen when I restart itunes after quitting, if I add new music, or sometimes just randomly as other music is playing.
I haven't been able to see if itunes continues to run through the same songs, since I tend to catch it while it's doing it, and not when it starts. And, the time it takes to complete can vary greatly from just several seconds to several minutes, all while showing roughly the same amount of songs being scanned.
I'm use to seeing itunes determine gapless playback when it was done importing a specific album, and that would be the end of it. But now, it keeps doing it. If I add an album, it starts checking an additional 800+ songs on average. And until it's done, itunes runs slow (playback buttons, scrolling through artists).
I know that these questions have been asked before, and I have google searched for them and have come across apple discussions about similar topics. However, more often than not, the discussions that I have come across have either been older, specifically about itunes store purchases, or have had multiple people say that they're having issues with no solution, so I apologize in advance if I've overlooked something that may have already addressed my concerns. I have also checked all of my permissions through disk utility, along with verifying the disk, which showed that it was running ok.

Answer 1

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!