iPhone Slow To Respond When Playing A Song?

My iPhone 4 has this annoying issue when playing a song. It freezes and locks up the iPhone while the song continues to play. The iPhone would not respond to ANY of the buttons for a good 30 seconds or so.

With the help a good friend, we investigated the issue and found something very unusual. (Btw, when I say we, he did 99% of the work).

Mashups, FTW!

First, let’s take a look at the specific songs and album. It’s a great mashup  album from the one-man band called Girl Talk.

Check out this great website that gives you a visualization of the many tracks that are used in the mashups. And, you can listen online too:

You can download it for free here (click on the image):

Album Art – The Culprit

Turns out the problem is not the mp3 but the album art that somehow got embedded in it. A few of the tracks had a JPEG album art file with embedded information from the original TIFF file. That’s not so much the problem. The problem was that the image size was 3744×3744. The image was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the TIFF was created from Adobe Photoshop CS4 Mac.

How did we find all this info?

1. Using a different MP3 player (MediaMonkey) loaded the mp3s and viewed their properties.
2. Then saved the artwork to hard drive.
3. Viewed that artwork in an image viewer.

The Fix

Fix, is very simple.

Remove all embedded images in the mp3. Then, add a new image, with a smaller size.

I’m not sure whether the original mp3s had the large image issue or perhaps I accidentally added the large album art myself.

Lesson here, check your mp3s if your iPhone is slow to respond when playing certain songs.