Oh noes! iTunes crashing

[yesthattom]

My iTunes gets the spinning wheel of rainbow about 2-3 minutes into using it. I’m not sure if that’s when the podcast downloads kick in or what. Sadly, it’s happening on both of my mac laptops.

I’ve tried deleting the plists a few times. No luck.

I’ve even removed the software, rebooted, and installed the latest release from scratch.

I don’t want to delete the XML file. I have all 6,000 songs rated (1 thru 5 stars). That would be a lot of work to repeat.

Suggestions?

Comments

[awfief.livejournal.com]

downgrade your itunes version?

[babbage.livejournal.com]

Is iTunes scriptable?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Yes. Are you proposing I script something to re-populate the ratings?

[babbage.livejournal.com]

Well, not recommending it. But perhaps it might come to that...

[niallm.livejournal.com]

ktrace the binary to see what system call it's hanging on, if any?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Sadly, the executables aren't ktrace-able. I assume this is to stop me from trying to reverse-engineer the DRM.

[niallm.livejournal.com]

Disable podcasts (in preferences) and quit/relaunch?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Good point. I'll try that first.

[disappearinjon.livejournal.com]

Check that your XML is well-formed -- there's also usually a backup file in that same directory, so you can frequently diff those and see the difference. I'm not sure how iTunes responds to a damaged file, so you might want to try tarring the whole iTunes directory to /dev/null and see if anything reports an i/o error.

You can also move the whole iTunes directory out of the way (it's better to copy and delete, as songs at least are tracked by inode rather than filename) and confirm that it starts without your data. Assuming that it does, you can try copying everything back, using the latest XML backup, etc.

ObSysAdmin: What, you don't back up your home PC? Have you considered Mozy or similar services?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize it tracks by inode. That's good information if I try that.

Ever since I disabled the Podcast downloads things are working. I'm going to try enabling that to see if it comes back. Then I know it has something to do with podcasts, downloads, or quite possibly DNS/nameservice (the cause of a lot of Mac issues)


ObSysAdmin-Reply: I have backups. I haven't heard of Mozy.

[disappearinjon.livejournal.com]

The track-by-inode certainly tripped me up when I started troubleshooting iTunes issues. Glad to hear that things are working again.

Mozy is one of the online-backup systems, free for up to 2gb, $5 a month for unlimited storage. The Mac interface is nice, but it's still in beta and somewhat buggy. (Maybe the new version I just downloaded is less buggy, we'll see.) In addition to daily external-hard-drive backups, it seems like a good tool. (Of course, I'll only know if I need to restore from it...)

[ckd]

Back up your iTunes Library and iTunes Music Library.xml files.

Move them both out of the iTunes directory.

Restart iTunes and "import" the XML file. This should restore your ratings, play counts, etc.

See if that fixes it; if the non-XML one is corrupted, this may get around it without losing too much of your metadata. (I think you lose date added and possibly also last played.) If you're desperate for the last played data, I probably still have a totally hacky Perl script that can fix those up using the XML file for reference.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Ah! I didn't realize one could import the XML file. That's an awesome tip.

I don't think I'll need that, however. It seems that disabling podcast downloads has fixed the problem. Next step is to re-enable it and see if the problem comes back. If I can narrow it to a software function, I'm willing to wait until the next release of iTunes to see if it gets fixed then.

[dannyman.livejournal.com]

file a bug with apple?