iTunes Won’t Play a Song or Add MP3? Here’s a Simple Fix
I recently encountered a strange bug where iTunes refused to add a song to it’s playlist and wouldn’t play the original source MP3 file either. Interestingly enough, the mp3 file played fine with Quick Look and even was able to play within the Finder preview, but no matter what I did I could not add or import the mp3 file to my iTunes playlist.
Fix for iTunes not playing/adding songs and MP3s
I came up with a fix that involves opening the song with QuickTime Player and then re-saving it as an iTunes compatible format to play as usual, here are the steps:
- Launch QuickTime Player
- Drag or Open the MP3 file into QuickTime Player
- From the File menu select “Save As”
- Select “iPhone” as the Format
- Click “Save” and let the mp3 file convert to an .m4v iPhone movie file
- Locate the newly created .m4v file and rename the .m4v extension to .m4a to ensure iTunes treats it as audio, and drag that file into iTunes
- Play the song in iTunes as usual
If you want, you can take this a step further and then select the song and convert it to AAC or MP3 with iTunes from the “Advanced” menu. Likewise you can use a third party utility like All2Mp3 and convert the song to MP3 that way as well.
If all else fails, you might want to learn to repair MP3 files, it’s not complicated and it will fix most other problems.
But the resulting m4v file is often treated as an video file. You’d want to rename the file to m4a at least to make iTunes treat it as an audio file.
Good suggestion, article updated. Thanks!
-Will
Es un buen tip.
Pero vamos, iTunes esta hecho para tocar files mp3. que arreglen el bug!!
[...] a program like this is helpful when iTunes won’t play a song, it’s usually because the format is incompatible with iTunes or because the file is [...]
[...] software you can try some other methods. I’ve found creative workarounds in the past when iTunes won’t play a song that involves importing the file into QuickTime and exporting it as a movie track before [...]
um… only works if you have quicktime pro…
Man thanks so much bro, this worked for me and i have tryed some other bs, thanks for the advice man, it really helped, i will refer my friends to you if they have the same problem. Thanks again bro ur a saviour – Mitch
Thank you so much! I have tried so many things to get my MP3′s to play and this worked (and was ten times easier and free) Thank you!
-Kinsey
it works, but i lose a lot of quality the bitrate drops from 320kbps to 128kbps.
Thanks a lot! This really works! I had trouble playing a certain .mp3 in iTunes and this was simple and fast!