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From: Michael Breslau on 20 Mar 2010 15:42
My wife has an iTunes library of 88 ripped CDs. It has been unaltered for
several months now - no additions, deletions, or changes. We are running
Snow Leopard and Software Update every week, so we are fully current.
We have no add-ons, extensions, skins, or customizations other than
those in iTunes preferences.

Last week playback of the music became really strange! It's OK as long
as iTunes stays in front, but as soon as it goes into the background then
it skips great sections of music and finishes the track in mere seconds.
It sounds sort of hiccoughy while it's skipping. Ugly.

Cannot use the mini player to stay in front while other programs are
active. Actually we can, but it doesn't solve the skipping problem.

Clue: She likes to keep many programs open all the time (FileMaker,
Eudora, Safari, iChat, etc.). It's never been a problem before.

The hardware is mid-2008 iMac, 3.06 GHz, 2 GB RAM.

Anyone have any ideas?
TIA
Mike
From: Doc O'Leary on 21 Mar 2010 15:49
In article <mbreslau-83C4D0.15422920032010(a)news.speakeasy.net>,
Michael Breslau <mbreslau(a)speakeasy.org> wrote:

> Last week playback of the music became really strange! It's OK as long
> as iTunes stays in front, but as soon as it goes into the background then
> it skips great sections of music and finishes the track in mere seconds.
> It sounds sort of hiccoughy while it's skipping. Ugly.
>
> Cannot use the mini player to stay in front while other programs are
> active. Actually we can, but it doesn't solve the skipping problem.
>
> Clue: She likes to keep many programs open all the time (FileMaker,
> Eudora, Safari, iChat, etc.). It's never been a problem before.

Sometimes programs that are left running have memory leaks that take
time to build up and affect the performance of the machine. A real-time
task like iTunes playback will show the most obvious effects, but the
whole machine should be feeling a bit sluggish if that is what is
happening.

Regardless, you can check on memory usage using the Activity Monitor
utility. Most programs should be under 100MB in the Real Memory column
(I forget if that is on by default; control-click in the column headers
to add it if not). You can also look at the bottom System Memory tab to
see if the free memory is getting all sucked up. Quit and re-launch the
apps that are the worst offenders and see how much less memory they take
up.

If you want to be lazy, you can just start quitting apps without
checking into who is being the pig. I have noticed that Safari and
iTunes can grow pretty large over time (may be less of a "leak" than a
cache issue). Logging out goes an extra step to clear out non-obvious
leaks (e.g., Dashboard widgets). Restarting, of course, is the last
resort.

--
My personal UDP list: 127.0.0.1, localhost, googlegroups.com, ono.com,
and probably your server, too.
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