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Apple Releases iTunes 12.4.2 With Fix for Short Track Playback Bug

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Apr 12, 2001
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Apple today released iTunes 12.4.2 with a fix for a bug that caused playback issues when listening to Apple Music tracks shorter than 60 seconds. Whenever a track shorter than 60 seconds was played, the next song would fail to play and cause a state of perpetual buffering.

This update resolves a playback issue with short Apple Music songs in your Up Next queue.
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Today's iTunes update can be downloaded through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.

MacRumors readers first discovered the playback bug towards the end of June and MacRumors was able to replicate it on Macs running OS X 10.11.5 and iTunes 12.4.1. It appeared to be caused by the way Apple Music queues songs, preparing to stream the next song in a playlist or album when the current song was 60 seconds from the end. When a song was less than a minute long, the next song failed to initiate.

Article Link: Apple Releases iTunes 12.4.2 With Fix for Short Track Playback Bug
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/18/apple-releases-itunes-12-4-2-with-playback-fix/
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MacRumors said:
MacRumors readers first discovered the playback bug towards the end of June and MacRumors was able to replicate it on Macs running OS X 10.11.5 and iTunes 12.4.1. It appeared to be caused by the way Apple Music queues songs, preparing to stream the next song in a playlist or album when the current song was 60 seconds from the end. When a song was less than a minute long, the next song failed to initiate.
Click to expand...

Hopefully they haven't just changed it to stream 59 seconds from the end :D
 
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Have they brought back Genius yet? I still don't understand why they killed that feature in iTunes, nor why they left the functionality there via iOS Remote (but I'm not complaining about the latter).
 
Howard Ellacott said:
Genius is under File>Library :)
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Won't show suggestions or offer to create playlists for Apple Music tracks anymore though. And while it still does in the Music app on iOS 9, Genius functionality will be, as far as I can see, eradicated from iOS 10 if you're an Apple Music subscriber. :(

edit - actually seems to work on hardly any Apple Music tracks in iOS (9) as well
 
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They just now are fixing this? When I used to back-up my entire library (Purchased and Ripped songs) I would run into this problem. I would import the library into the new machine or reinstalled machine and had songs that would be short like this. Weird.
 
OldSchoolMacGuy said:
As no Macs offer DVD drives at this point, I don't see Apple bothering to put in the effort to fix that.
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I know. There are external DVD drives, but Apple won't care. They at least shouldn't have broken features. It says "insert second disc" then keeps saying the disc already has data when it doesn't. I wasted an hour on it then had to manually split up my 1996 Toyota Land Cruiser playlist :(
 
tkermit said:
Won't show suggestions or offer to create playlists for Apple Music tracks anymore though. And while it still does in the Music app on iOS 9, Genius functionality will be, as far as I can see, eradicated from iOS 10 if you're an Apple Music subscriber. :(

edit - actually seems to work on hardly any Apple Music tracks in iOS (9) as well
Click to expand...

I wonder if we've come to the end of Genius? It wasn't showing up for local music on iOS 10 either.
 
I wonder when they'll fix the automatic album ratings. That bug dates back to 2008 and it is the bane of my iTunes library playlists. No matter how many times I go through and remove album ratings, some random new albums suddenly have ratings next time I open iTunes.
 
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I should have never installed this update. Ever since I did, iTunes continuously suffers from spinning balls of death.

I've lost count how many times I've had to force quit so far.

Rebooted numerous times.

Web content subprocess "not responding" in the iTunes Store page for music.

General slowness all around with it.

Piece of garbage now, IMO (even more than it was before, if that can be imagined.) I'd understand if it were a Sierra beta build, but this is release code.

~22000 songs, and several thousand videos in the library. Media all stored on a network location. I change library to point to local disk, and it takes 2 hours to update library (without telling it to keep library organized.) Change location back to network share, and it's another two hours to finish that library update. Before, the same operation would take 5-10 minutes.

Update: I think I fixed it. Opened up Keychain Access app and deleted all the entries for NAS shares and then re-authenticated to them in Finder. iTunes is now back to its usual bloated speed. So, my keychain entries were corrupted somehow. What a pain in the a**.

Was starting to get all curmudgeonly about it, too. That was close!
 
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Jessica Lares said:
It came before the 8 and 12-inch vinyl format that you see on some store shelves today.
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Trendy modern vinyl rubbish. They say its better than 64kbps MP3 but Vinyl lacks the immediacy, vitality, reality and the shade of pinky-orange-blue that MP3s acquire from contact with the internet. How can you really connect with your music when its just a big black disk of plastic with no star ratings or links to band websites - and no visualisations? And the covers? Far too big - you can see where the zits have been photoshopped out, not like the jewel-like little icons you get in the playlist. Oh, and... how do you share them with your friends (they say there's a new technology called 'a 5 pack of C90s' that will enable sharing but Walmart doesn't have them in yet)?

Sorry, these vinyl things just take the soul out of music. Its just a con so they can sell us gimmicks like "Analogue" headphones and more expensive speaker cables (some idiots keep claiming that with analog signals you can get better quality by using better cables). Next thing is they will be sticking an extra 2 minutes of intro onto 8" singles and selling them as '12" remixes' (well, it could happen) to try and sell more copies.

Update: My mate says it will be better when more of the new releases have been "analogically re-mastered" or, better still, originally recorded in analog (they ought to put something on the cover to let you know, like 'DAA' or 'AAA').
 
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I just wish they'd put buttons having similar purposes in the same places in this horrid, Swiss Army knife of an app. It's bad enough that it has so many functions crammed into one app. It can't even have the same UI for those functions.
 
omihek said:
I wonder when they'll fix the automatic album ratings. That bug dates back to 2008 and it is the bane of my iTunes library playlists. No matter how many times I go through and remove album ratings, some random new albums suddenly have ratings next time I open iTunes.
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Yes, this! I didn't realize the bug dated back that far. I didn't begin to experience it until that past year or two. It's driving me crazy.

iTunes has become a shambling hulk of minor bugs and interface "quirks." iTunes 13 needs to be a SL-style maintenance release. All of the developer resources they currently direct to implementing whatever UI-of-the-month that falls out of the collective backside of the UI team need to be redirected to delousing and cleaning up this inbred mongrel.
 
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