Users are reporting serious "issues" with the latest version of Apple's iTunes media player.

Apple released iTunes 7 on Tuesday, introducing a feature dubbed 'gapless playback' that eliminates pauses between two consecutive songs on an album, allowing for smooth transitions between songs. 

Version 7 also introduced a new way to browse through a media collection by flipping through the album art.

But users who upgraded to the latest version are reporting several problems.

"Anyone who has not yet downloaded iTunes 7, I strongly advise you to wait until the bugs are worked out," recommended one user whose iPod and iTunes ceased to function after updating to the latest version. 

Windows users complained that the songs in their library were "extremely distorted" after they updated the software.

"It sounds like sound coming though a slowly spinning box fan," one user complained on an Apple user forum. 

Some users suggested that the issues were related to the new 'gapless playback' feature, which requires the software to index the user's entire music collection.

This process could take up a significant amount of processor resources, causing the poor audio quality. Further supporting the theory, other users reported that the media player stopped working when other applications were running.

Waiting for the gapless indexing to finish did not solve the issues for all users, however.

Several users running Macs complained that the application crashed when skipping tracks. A user by the name of ApathyJones pointed out that disabling the Sound Enhancer feature dealt with the problem. 

vnunet.com was unable to re-create either of the reported problems using a dual-boot MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.4.7 and Windows XP SP2. 

Representatives from Apple did not return requests for comment.

Additional reporting by Shaun Nichols.