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Itunes keeps skipping/stuttering - Macbook Pro 15.4 inch 2011

V

Versus.Fate

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 19, 2011
4
0
Hey everyone. I just recently bought the early 2011 macbook pro 15 inch. Its got 2Ghz i7, 4gb ddr3 ram and 256 vga. I'm loving it.

However, only about a week into it, I started experiencing some stuttering during playback with iTunes. What i mean is for example while playing a song it might pause/lag for a second before continuing. This usually happens when Im browsing webpages, or a webpage takes long to respond giving the spinning mouse icon. After that, I usually pause iTunes, and switch the page off. I press play again and there is a small chance it can follow with another skip during the song. Ive had it happen with just iTunes running at one point.

Yesterday I updated to the new 10.5.2 iTunes. It stopped the stutter but today it started happening again...
What's going on here? Is there something wrong with my macbook? Isn't iTunes supposed to work properly regardless since I have 4 gig ram? how can safari overload it so much that it makes it skip?

Music is really important to me. I'm a producer in learning and recently just bought cubase. I don't want this to affect my producing in the future.

Everything else is reported to work fine.
Please help !

EDIT: I'm running OSX Lion if thats any help. I'm new to mac.

Also: Whenever I stop a song playing its usually accompanied by a slight pop.
 
Versus.Fate said:
Hey everyone. I just recently bought the early 2011 macbook pro 15 inch. Its got 2Ghz i7, 4gb ddr3 ram and 256 vga. I'm loving it.

However, only about a week into it, I started experiencing some stuttering during playback with iTunes. What i mean is for example while playing a song it might pause/lag for a second before continuing. This usually happens when Im browsing webpages, or a webpage takes long to respond giving the spinning mouse icon. After that, I usually pause iTunes, and switch the page off. I press play again and there is a small chance it can follow with another skip during the song. Ive had it happen with just iTunes running at one point.

Yesterday I updated to the new 10.5.2 iTunes. It stopped the stutter but today it started happening again...
What's going on here? Is there something wrong with my macbook? Isn't iTunes supposed to work properly regardless since I have 4 gig ram? how can safari overload it so much that it makes it skip?

Music is really important to me. I'm a producer in learning and recently just bought cubase. I don't want this to affect my producing in the future.

Everything else is reported to work fine.
Please help !

EDIT: I'm running OSX Lion if thats any help. I'm new to mac.
Click to expand...
Your machine is still under warranty, I'd bring it in for service. With that said, it could be a number of things, but I strongly doubt your RAM is at fault here. My personal guess would be a hard drive related problem.
 
Yeah I guess I could do that, I was just hoping there was a solution before resorting to that... Just noticed VLC lags audio too. This is such a strange problem.

EDIT: Just switched off put the HD to sleep whenever possible in the energy saver preferences. Its running fine so far. Do you think this should be necessary?

EDIT 2: Just happened again, never mind.
 
Had the exact same problem after upgrading to Lion. I thought it was hard drive as well, but I upgraded to 8gb of ram instead and have not had an issue since. Lion does, unfortunately, appear to hog more memory.

Most likely all they're going to do at the Apple store is just a bunch of PRAM resets and such, which may help for a day or so, but then it will come back.

If you're looking for cheap ram, OWC is great quality, but still a good price.
 
BJB Productions said:
Had the exact same problem after upgrading to Lion. I thought it was hard drive as well, but I upgraded to 8gb of ram instead and have not had an issue since. Lion does, unfortunately, appear to hog more memory.

Most likely all they're going to do at the Apple store is just a bunch of PRAM resets and such, which may help for a day or so, but then it will come back.

If you're looking for cheap ram, OWC is great quality, but still a good price.
Click to expand...

You should not need 8 GB of RAM to play music in iTunes. My MBA with 4 GB of RAM does it perfectly. Lion does not "hog" more memory. It USES more memory and there is a vital difference. Lion uses available memory for caching. If an application needs the memory, it will release it. There is clearly something wrong with the op's computer but he hasn't provided any detailed info (what is running, cpu usage, memory status) so it's difficult to speculate what the problem is.
 
Hey. It just happened again, I just had iTunes and Safari with 4 tabs running.

With these two, checking my activity monitor

CPU : % User: 1.35
% System: 1.69

I don't know how to post this, since it keeps changing especially when I switch from safari to activity monitor to check my numbers. (user from 5, system from 3, and drops to the above values)

Memory free: 1.20 gigs, used 2.80 gigs.

Just from these two? :S
Also safari web content and flash player are running.
 
Just thought I should reply for anyone else having this problem in the future. I took the mac for fixing and it turns out when I downloaded perian for quicktime it changed my sound output settings from "Stereo" to "Dolby Pro Logic" which is what was causing the skip. After this change it has not happened since.
 
I have a 2011 MBP Pro running Lion OSX with 8 GB RAM and SSD with data doubler HD setup. I also have the iTunes stutter problem. I have all the latest updates and itunes still stutters.. How this computer can't run iTunes and Chrome without stutter is unacceptable to me. Has anyone found a solution or know if Apple plans to fix this. I have been a huge Apple supporter but find that I have nothing but problems since Lion.. Versus how do you change the sound settings like you suggested? Someone please help, I am so frustrated with this issue!
 
Versus.Fate said:
EDIT: I'm running OSX Lion if thats any help. I'm new to mac.
Click to expand...

Hey, I don't know if you ever got this problem sorted but i've been recently experiencing the same symptoms as your machine. I'm also fairly new to Mac OS and I have a late 2011 13inch MBP.

Today when I woke I had accidentally not shut down my computer the previous night so it had no charge. Plugged it in, started browsing youtube & soundcloud and all the content was skipping. So I head over to istat nano and it tells me I have 399mb Ram free.. I start uninstalling useless widgets that I rarely use and closing all my firefox tabs, it does nothing to the ram.

I was about to head to the activity monitor when I realised Diablo 3 was running in the background :p So I command Q out of it.. the Ram was freed. You probably already know by now as you've had your machine so long, but clicking the red x isn't enough to completely shut down a program, make sure you command S then command Q

Oh by the way! content is now streaming without any graphical or sound glitches!
 
Last edited:
Versus.Fate said:
Just thought I should reply for anyone else having this problem in the future. I took the mac for fixing and it turns out when I downloaded perian for quicktime it changed my sound output settings from "Stereo" to "Dolby Pro Logic" which is what was causing the skip. After this change it has not happened since.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this fixed my problem as well (at least I haven't encountered it since). For anyone experiencing this problem, check to see if you installed Perian and change the output from there to Stereo. Thanks Versus.Fate, I owe you one!
 
bumping this thread, having the exact same issue. 2011 mbp 15inch. i have noticed the same thing playing anything with sound, vlc, itunes etc. those together with Safari o any browser will stall the whole computer, but it doesnt show anything on the activity monitor, except for data written to disc, which goes into red. so im taking this might be harddrive related? playing a file from the harddrive while browsing the internet seems to be the issue. quite irritating. anyone got a clue why?
 
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