I have searched here for hours, now I am desperate for some help (thank you in advance.) Itunes is dropping/losing the sound at the very end of mp3 tracks which other players are playing fine.

This became noticeable with some CDs that are either live (or soundtracks) that have some tracks without a silence gap, or no gaps at all. I ripped and encoded using EAC and LAME to MP3 vbr. Strange thing is when playing the mp3s of an album in itunes, itunes literally drops the sound the last second or so of the track then starts up seemingly losing the first bit of next track. However, the same mp3s played with MS Media Player (for comparison) dont' lose anything, and while there is a very slight pause between live tracks, it's barely noticeable with media player.

I am in a bind because I need to setup an iPod / iTunes for a client, and I have already got hundreds of CDs encoded. I never realized iTunes would have this issue. Can anyone advise? (I am not using crossfading in itunes, btw.)

I know many people don't use itunes, but I need to configure it for a client so I have no choice. I hope there is someone on this forum that can help me!!
THANKS !!!

You should go into iTunes' 'Preferences' and change the 'Crossfade' point, or disable the use of the 'Crossfade' and see if that changes anything.

I have tried not using crossfade, then tried using it with a zero time, and also with crossfade set at a few seconds, and still has no effect!

Itunes plays the source .wav to the very end without a problem, so I tried different encoding options with EAC using LAME, but I cannot seem to solve the problem. Itunes still drops the last 1-2 seconds of the resulting mp3s

Anyone else have any ideas? I have to ship this damn system out by tomorrow afternoon, and I'm completely stumped ! Thanks !!

Tell your client that iTunes is buggy and you can't do anything about it until Apple fixes the problem.

The same behavior is found in other peoples' iTunes as well, and it seems to be an issue of iTunes miscalculating the track length. It's a price you pay for using iTunes.

Is it a Mac or PC?

If it is a Mac then go to /Users/username/Library/Preferences

and delete the itunes.plist then Open iTunes again and see if that fixes it.
If it's a PC then, hmmm.

the only other thing I can think of is to go into iTunes' Preferences> Advanced Tab> Burning> and change the Gap Between songs. But I doubt that is it.