iTunes 11 Stuttering During Playback I have a 2011 generation Macbook Pro, upgrade to 16gb RAM and a 128gb SSD drive - running Mountain Lion and iTunes 11. 

During playback (approximately 20 times per song) it stutters, stops playing for a few seconds, and then resumes from where it left off. It seems to co-incide with my using the keyboard or performing any file operations - and at the same time the file operations freeze up. The following screenshot was taken about 3 seconds after a skip and doesn't show any signficant CPU activity:



However, if I close iTunes, I get no problems with file operations, or any other app on my machine - leading me to believe that iTunes is causing the problem. Has anyone else run into anything similar, or have any advice on stopping iTunes being such a resource hog?

Note: Other apps (for instance VLC) have no problem with playback under the same conditions.
Buried deep in the comments are these answers to solve the riddle of the stuttering iTunes playback on Mountain Lion:


  I've just remembered that I have FileVault enabled, and as the crashes / skips happen when the computer is performing file ops, I think turning FV off might help - decryping my hard drive now... – George Pearce Jan 12 at 14:34  
  
  Update: Turning off filevault and decrypting my hard drive appears to have entirely solved the problem. – George Pearce Jan 12 at 19:20