iTunes crashes when seeking from one CD track to the next.

January 25, 2006 1:37 PM

iTunes (Mac) crashes when seeking from one CD track to the next.

I think this started when I upgraded to Tiger, but there was a long spell when I didn't play any music CDs, so it's hard to pinpoint the origin of the problem. Turning off the crossfade setting doesn't help.

When iTunes is playing a CD it will always crash when it finishes one track and tries to go to the next.

I can manually use the track-forward and track-backward buttons to get from one track to another without any crash; any individual track plays fine, and the drive burns CDs without a problem. But if it is allowed to finish playing a track, it will always crash.

The drive is the superdrive that came with the computer (G5 PowerMac), and it received the firmware update to Firmware Revision C03D when I installed Tiger. iTunes and OS X are both most recent versions, but the problem has persisted across many versions. I've asked at apple-specific forums and got no response.

Anyone have any ideas? I'd be very grateful. I'm on the brink of loosing my cool, here.

posted by Wolfdog to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Create a new user account and try to run iTunes under the new account.

If the problem does not reoccur, there is a problem with the iTunes preferences in your Library folder. Drag them to the trash and reopen iTunes.

If the problem reoccurs, do a clean install ("Archive and Install" option) of Tiger.
posted by Rothko at 1:41 PM on January 25, 2006

I don't know why this would happen, but the workaround is pretty obvious (import the CD to iTunes).
posted by designbot at 1:57 PM on January 25, 2006

Response by poster: Yes, of course I tried getting rid of all the iTunes plists and letting them get created anew, and the problem persists (naturally, it does with a different account, too).

The workaround is indeed obvious (as is the workaround of unchecking all the track so it doesn't advance, and doing it manually), but not acceptable.

Feh. I really do not want to do a clean install.
posted by Wolfdog at 2:55 PM on January 25, 2006

Before doing something as drastic as a clean install, always try Disk Utility's "Repair Disk Permissions" on your boot disk. And then shutdown fully and reboot.
posted by todbot at 5:34 PM on January 25, 2006

Feh. I really do not want to do a clean install.

If you check off "Preserve users and network settings" under the custom "Archive and Install" option, your account preferences are saved. It's a good way to start with a fresh OS.
posted by Rothko at 8:09 AM on January 26, 2006