Audio playback in iTunes may be affected if Chirp is left running for a period of several days. The symptom is a periodic (every 2-3 seconds), few-milliscond interruption in the audio stream.

The cause of this appears to be an interaction between Java and iTunes on OS X. Apple is aware of the issue, and a fix is expected in an upcoming release of OS X.

Workaround: exit and restart Chirp. Audio playback will return to normal. (iTunes does not need to be restarted.)

Affects all releases of Chirp.

Update 20 December 2006: The issue seems to have disappeared completely in Mac OS 10.4.6 and later. Please advise us if you still experience this problem.

Update 1 February 2006: This issue has gotten better in Mac OS 10.4.4 (Tiger). It still occurrs, but over a much longer period of time. We expect future releases of OS X, and future releases of Chirp, to cooperate better to eliminate this entirely.

(Tiny URL for this article: http://tinyurl.com/zlcen.)