Mac OSX Snow Leopard, iTunes, freezes while playing music

[dibblebill]

My fiance has a 2009 Macbook Pro with OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and iTunes version 10.6.1. When she is playing certain music files, always *.m4a that she imported, it freezes the entire OS for 5-10 minutes at a time until it arbitrarily either a) skips the rest of the song or 2) resumes playback.

Google has been entirely unhelfpul so far, has anybody else here seen this happen?

 

[SiempreTuna]

'fraid I'm an IT pro so have obviously never used Macs

My missus has been having issues with her Air freezing which apparently are related to free space .. or rather, the complete lack of it. I did suggest she try deleting some stuff or maybe get a bigger HDD, but being a iPerson, her solution is to get a new Mac

Fortunately, it's provided by her employer ..

 

[dibblebill]

Yeah... She's got a good Macbook, with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive (over 350GB of which are free), but this issue is beyond me. Apparently she's the only one with the problem that's reporting it online... I took a first-hand look, its almost like something is locking the hard drive's I/O and not letting anything else access it when this happens. We're trying to figure out if its the hard drive, but I've no disk diagnostics experience when it comes to Mac, since a new hard drive is <$100.

 

[mikedt]

My fiance has a 2009 Macbook Pro with OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard and iTunes version 10.6.1. When she is playing certain music files, always *.m4a that she imported, it freezes the entire OS for 5-10 minutes at a time until it arbitrarily either a) skips the rest of the song or 2) resumes playback.

Google has been entirely unhelfpul so far, has anybody else here seen this happen?

Try updating iTunes, current version is 11.1.2. Is it only iTunes that's acting funky or other software as well, like Safari, etc. Is it showing the spinning beachball busy cursor, or is it freezing completely?

BTW I'm using an older 2007 Macbook with 2GB RAM also with Snow Leopard. But what I did a few months ago, was to erase the HDD and re-install OS X fresh plus the updates, along with the software I need. And it's working well.