iPhone MP3 skipping, works in iTunes?
I just synced an mp3 album I had downloaded and copied into iTunes on my iPhone (1st gen, not a 3G), but every song was stuttering and skipping. The files themselves are fine–they all play fine in iTunes. The file I was trying to play had the following attributes:
Bitrate: 96 kbps
Encoder: FhG
Tags: ID3 v1/v2
Sample Rate: 44.100 khz
Trolling through online forums, the following advice was offered:
- Use the “Rock EQ” preset (didn’t work for me, and I tried turning EQ Off / Soundcheck On/Off too)
- Restore the iPhone (that sounds like a pain)
- Delete the playlist and remove all the songs from the phone, then create a new playlist and resync them
- Convert the music to AAC (right-click, convert to AAC)
Since the last option is the easiest, I tried it. And it worked–smooth playback. It’s possible that there really was something horrible with the files, as they stutter in VLC too!
iTunes With Low Memory
This is kinda neat, I think my iTunes ran out of memory. It stopped being able to correctly render images, and everything just kindof showed a default placeholder “broken image” picture:
I have 4Gb of physical memory in my computer, and at the time, only iTunes (dead) and a web browser (alive) open. So strange that iTunes ran out of memory and started rendering garbage. Pretty picture, though!
Apple iTunes Sucks: Slow!
It has to be said–Apple iTunes sucks. It’s freakishly slow on Windows. I don’t know what the problem is, but plugging in my iPhone into a USB 2.0 port to sync it causes the whole system to come to a drag. I’ve got 3 Gbs Seagate drives, 4 Gb of RAM, and I’m still running Windows XP so I can’t even blame Vista.
That leaves Apple holding all the blame. It’s not just syncing either. These are all slow:
- Importing new songs into my Library of 15K items (probably due to parsing, editing in place, and writing to disk a 10+ Mb XML file for each song) [who uses XML as a database...]
- Searching through my Library
- Playing any kind of high bitrate media or encoded video (I have an nVidia 8800 with 512 MB of RAM… it should be able to play a little 720p video smoothly)
Suspiciously, Mac users don’t complain iTunes is slow. Either Steve Jobs literally makes them duller so they tend not to notice the passage of time, or it’s just iTunes on Windows that sucks.
