I opened the following support case with Apple – I’ve seen this happen too many times with iTunes Music Store downloads recently.

In short, while you’re playing music the music stops playing and proceeds to the next track, despite there being time left on the track.  The issue does not happen on my iPhone, iPad or Apple TVs.

Buyer beware – just in case…

I purchased Pet Shop Boys “Elysium” (Order MGZBZW1437) and “Winner” (Order MGZBTMXGJ9) – both have tracks that when played on iTunes on my Mac, it sometimes stops in the middle of the track and proceeds to the next track. On my iPhone and Apple TVs the content plays correctly.

Here are the tracks that do that:

– From Elysium – Leaving, The Early Stuff, Give it a go, Elysium Track by Track (with David Walliams)

– From Winner – The way through the woods (Long Version) –

To recreate either play the whole track through or you can even scan through the track. In the case of “The way through the woods (Long Version)”, it stops at where you think the end of the track is but there is a whole second part to the track. It stops at 4:03 with 1:39 still left in the track – which is the best part of the track.

I’m not sure if this is an iTunes Store encoding issue, or a problem with iTunes software itself. I’d appreciate the store looking into this.