iTunes Streaming problem

Hi all. I have iTunes setup on 2 Windows based machines. It's a simple set up where pc1 has all the music and playlists, I "share" it via the iTunes preferences, and on pc2 I have iTunes loaded which connects to pc1.

pc1 is a Dell quad-core desktop (4gig ram) with iTunes 7.6.1.9, Medium buffer
pc2 is a Dell Mini9 (1gig ram) with iTunes 8.0.x, Large buffer
both pcs are wireless and XP Home

Very cool. Very easy.

However, often (every 2-3 songs) the song will get choppy...it's not a skip but similar...hard to put in words. It may happen 1-2 times per song and it's not very noticeable but it is there if you are actually listening to the song.

I am using a wireless G network and the signal strength is always excellent.

I am streaming 192k MP3 files so typically the file is 5MB-7MB in size.

This problem is intermittent...it may happen to 3 songs in a row and then not happen for 4 hours. The 2 pcs never move. The wireless connection does not drop as I can easily surf, etc. while the iTunes is having this problem. On 2 different occasions I saw an iTunes pop-up error message about a buffer problem and it could no longer see pc1...restarting iTunes seemed to fix it. I will write the error message down next time.

Currently the pc2 iTunes buffer is set to Large. It is a Dell Mini9 netbook so it is not the most powerful cpu on the planet...but should be plenty of horsepower in 2009 to run iTunes and play an MP3 file. I have looked at other articles on the net and nothing matches my exact problem (most people are trying to stream over the internet or internet radio stations or videos)...and there seems to be no clear indication/examples of what size the buffer SHOULD be set to. You would think increasing the buffer would reducing skipping/pausing/problems as there is more data in the buffer.


Have any of you seen/heard this issue before? I am pretty convinced this is an iTunes issue. Other software applications are not running. Both machines are XP Home with plenty of ram and plenty of wireless signal. There is a slight chance that iTunes 8.x is just a cpu hog on the netbook...but is has 1gig ram, Task Manager has nothing running (no antivirus, no firewall, no MS Office or Adobe, etc) so the CPU is free to run.

Unfortunately I do not have a 3rd machine to test.

Any ideas besides trying a 3rd machine? I could copy all the music to an external and run the netbook's iTunes using the USB drive...which if ran fine would point more to a network/streaming issue...if it still had a problem, it would point towards iTunes in general (bug?) or the CPU is underpowered. I also don't see any documentation that Buffer size is applicable to iTunes sharing...maybe it's only for internet streaming?

-Eric

 

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Nobody has ever seen this? Any help or guidance would be appreciated.