iTunes 11 Determing Gapless Playback Information
05 08, 14 Filed in: Macintosh Software | iTunes
How to stop iTunes 11 from spinning its wheels "Determining Gapless Playback Information" at every startup - by David R Beebe
Since updating my iMac 27" running OS X 10.6.8 to iTunes 11, the app spends its first few seconds at every startup "Determining Gapless Playback Information". The list kept growing and got as high as 120+ out of 7000 songs. Not a big deal but I found it annoying. Supposedly this is due to some sort of database corruption but nothing I read online solved the problem including reimporting the files.
The list of songs being analyzed flashed by very quickly in iTunes info window. The only way to catch the list was to startup iTunes and record a short video of that part of the screen with my iPhone5. I mailed the video to myself and opened it with QuickTime Player. Even when parsing the video frame by frame with the right arrow key, the screen updates were slower than the processing. It took 4 video captures to make it through the entire list.
I found that converting the suspect .mp3 files to .aac but deleting/keeping the original .mp3 files just in case was an effective work-around. The Gapless analysis, if it still happens at start-up, is no longer finding songs to fuss about. I can't imagine what Amazon is doing with their .mp3 encoding that is causing iTunes to behave badly.
The list of songs being analyzed flashed by very quickly in iTunes info window. The only way to catch the list was to startup iTunes and record a short video of that part of the screen with my iPhone5. I mailed the video to myself and opened it with QuickTime Player. Even when parsing the video frame by frame with the right arrow key, the screen updates were slower than the processing. It took 4 video captures to make it through the entire list.
I found that converting the suspect .mp3 files to .aac but deleting/keeping the original .mp3 files just in case was an effective work-around. The Gapless analysis, if it still happens at start-up, is no longer finding songs to fuss about. I can't imagine what Amazon is doing with their .mp3 encoding that is causing iTunes to behave badly.