What is making iTunes stop playing when my computer idles?

I've got a rare weekend with nothing to do, so I'm getting some housework done. I have iTunes playing for some background noise. Every 20 minutes or so, it just stops playing; if I move the mouse it starts again.

I'm on Windows 7 64-bit. My power settings have my monitor turning off at 10 minutes and hard drives at 20. Both sleep and hibernate are disabled.

"Aha!", you say, "Clearly when the hard drive is turned off iTunes is stopping!" Not so. I fiddled with the settings and changed them to make the hard drive sleep in 5 minutes, and iTunes kept playing for the 7 minutes I watched it. I'm currently trying to see what happens if I set the hard drive to never turn off, but I'd prefer to leave it at 20 minutes to save minor amounts of energy. (Edit: I just set it to 240 minutes, and it stopped at 20 minutes. It seems tied to when the monitor turns off; that seems odd and I'm testing that now.)

What other settings could be the culprit?

Solution 1:

I had this happened to me because my audio output was via my HDMI cable, so when the display turned off, so did my audio. One way to fix this is to change your power settings to never turn your display off. Something I'm testing is to see if enabling the iTunes visualizer will prevent the display from going off.