iTunes 10.5.3.3 - songs ending early

For no clear reason, since a recent OS wipe & reinstallation of iTunes, songs in my music collection are ending early.

This is not merely a case where the song's metadata makes it appear to be 30 seconds longer than it is; the song rather abruptly ends in the middle of lyrics/music/etc.

The songs are marked "played" (their "plays" number increments, and their "last played" date updates) as though I'd listened all the way through them, but they're ending early.

I'm on Windows 7, iTunes 10.5.3.3.

This does happen with songs I am streaming via iTunes Match but doesn't just happen with those songs.

Anybody run into this before or have any suggestions on how to prevent it?

edit It appears that for certain specific songs, iTunes has "decided" that their end time is early. My example song here is 'Sentimental Johnny' by Flogging Molly (not that it matters). This song's track length is 4:47. At 3:13 into the track, it ends abruptly. If I try to "fast forward" past this point by clicking on a further-forward moment on the "track time" bar at the top of iTunes, the song ends (and its "plays" and "last played" update as described above).

The problem isn't resolved, though. I am inclined to reinstall iTunes and see if that makes the issue go away.

Solution 1:

Well I'm afraid that I resorted to the obvious Windows thing -- I uninstalled iTunes, renamed my iTunes library, and then reinstalled. After reinstalling, everything appears to be OK (my "test song" now plays completely). I assume there was a problem somewhere in iTunes's metadata repository.

Solution 2:

I'd recommend checking the 'crossfade' settings in the Preferences, if something weird has been set there iTunes could be assuming it needs to just kill the song and start again.

Solution 3:

In the Options tab of the Get Info box for a particular song, you can set the start time and stop time of a song. (I use this when there's an extra ten seconds at the end of a song, or an outro that goes on forever, or whatever.) Is that set to the wrong time on the tracks you're having trouble with?

Solution 4:

I've seen this a lot with music downloaded from the iTunes Store. Deleting the offending song and downloading it again fixes the problem for me.

I haven't tried it, but it may be that you can simply delete the song from iTunes, then reimport the file.