Bizarre iTune behavior

[collisionbend]

Has anyone seen this? It's starting to drive me insane:

When using iTunes, listening to a particular tune, I'm expecting that iTunes will continue on to the next tune on the album its playing. Shuffle is OFF. iTunes will, at the end of the song, move to another song in the library, regardless of artist, genre, etc.

For example, say you're listening to Artist A, whose CD is songs 200-210. At the end of #205, and you're expecting #206, it will move to play the next tune - like #253, which is Artist B, and another genre altogether. If you're listening to #208, though, you'll get #209...

I have at least a dozen albums where this happens, too (or more). It seems to redirect to the same four or five albums, too. I own all of the albums in question - all of them were ripped from CD at one point in time or another; none are from iTunes purchases. And - it didn't always do this - at one point, it was well-behaved.

The only thing that seems to make sense to me is that my library has been on several hard drives over the years, and maybe the database is corrupt. Is there any way to clean this up and make iTunes behave properly, or am I going to have to re-rip all of my music into a new iTunes database?

My iTunes database is 5,736 songs, 17:15:36:10 total time, 46.31GB - nowhere near huge, compared to some people I know, but still a royal PIA to re-rip...

Any ideas?

 

[LaWally]

I have never, ever experienced that behavior in iTunes. The only thing I can think of is that your meta data is messed up, and that somehow songs from some albums have become intermixed?

Since you say it is a dozen albums for which you experience this behavior, I would take a close look at the meta data (Get Info) for those albums and see if you see something that would cause it.

One way to do this: select the first track of one of the albums where you see the strange behavior. Open the Get Info window. Click on the Next button and see if the next sequential track for that album is selected. Repeat this process until the next track selected unexpectedly takes you to another album. Examine the Get Info data carefully. The answer as to why it jumped into another album should be there.

AFTER_THOUGHT: In particular, check the sort album data in the sorting tab. I have seen instances where the sort album name refers to another album altogether. That will cause problems like you are seeing.

 

[collisionbend]

So... I finally had the time to work with it...

...and tried a few things.

What worked: I closed iTunes and trashed both the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml and ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Library.itl files. Then I restarted iTunes and re-imported the iTunes Media folder. It took about 20 minutes or so - and it worked!