Itunes 'processing file' for hours

I simply cannot grasp why this has NOT BEEN FIXED YET.

I've turned to Amazon's mp3 store because of this, and this alone.

Utterly ridiculous...

My MacBook Pro has no issues, but I don't use it for my music.

Ben Haley1
Windows has a lot of little programs that can be downloaded from the internet, and unlike most Mac programs, they seem to interfere with each other, especially DLL files.


Good for you on using Amazon, though; it's probably too much time & trouble to troubleshoot iTunes Windows if you're a Mac person.

This is terrible. Don't they get a lot of people calling and telling them their first download was unsuccessful? I uninstalled VCast from my machine. (It's what Verizon uses to download music and videos to their cell phones, and that seems to have reduced the processing file step down from forever to about 10 minutes.) Any more I expect downloading music to happen quickly... I should be listening to an album I just downloaded in 5 minutes flat. I could if iTunes wasn't spending so much time "processing".

This is incredibly frustrating. Even with iTunes 9 this has not been fixed.

I really am not too keen on it taking a half hour to download an album over high-speed cable internet. Amazon downloads high-quality mp3's free of user information in about 2 minutes per album, if that.

I downloaded an iTunes LP, and on top of the tracks processing forever, the LP file (which has a little icon like a digital booklet in iTunes) actually consists of several m4v and AAC files, so it too has to process all the files within it. I have been waiting 40+ minutes for an album to download, and counting. And I'm one of the lucky ones after seeing these stories of 12 hour processings.

Please Apple, get on the ball with this.

I've had this problem ever since I started purchasing albums from iTunes Music Shop and only patience was a kind of solution. Now with iTunes 9 the problem has been gone 😉

Still having same issue with Itunes 9 -- any fixes available for this ?

I was having the same problem until I unchecked the 'Allow simultaneous downloads' box and everything works fine now.

This is the first and last time I'm ever downloading music form Itunes. I bought my first album (which consists of 700+ songs) because it was at a reduced price. The problem that I'm experiencing like most of the people that posted here, is that when I try to download the music that I paid for instead of waiting the amount of time that it takes to download one song I have to wait another 1-2 min (luckily not 1 hour) on top of that for the song to be processed. If that wasn't enough the CPU usage while this magical processing occurs goes to 100%. I don't know about you but I don't plan on leaving my computer at 100% usage for 700+ minutes.

What baffles me is that this problem hasn't been fixed for 1+ years and people don't even complain about it (except this forum and a few others). As a computer engineer (that almost got to work for Apple), I'm disgusted by the lack attention this has been getting. People try to blame it on Windows, or the services that you are running in the background, but the truth is that Apple should have caught all these problems in QA testing. I mean I can't imagine what processing you could be doing for 2 min on a 5 meg song that could bring your CPU to 100%. One theory that I've read is that DRM-free music from the iTunes Store ("Plus" tracks) get your Apple ID inserted in them, but again how does that take 2 min?

I'm curious to hear more theories, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm probably going to fry my CPU while downloading the music that I paid for. I'm probably going to find a work around (limit the CPU usage for Itunes or buy an i7), I just feel sad for the regular user and people that download from Itunes in general.

There is still no fix for this. Worse yer, no acknowledgment from Apple that the issue exists and the will address it.

I encountered this just once a good while ago but just again today. Can't believe it's not fixed, shame on you Apple.
I just purchased an album and got stuck processing the first song in the download. I turned on simultaneous downloads and the next two songs downloaded but got stuck "processing".
I ran Activity Monitor to see what the CPU was doing, maybe it was transcoding or something but there was no indication of that. I haven't read much of this post but I saw a reference somewhere to authorization so I tried to access my account settings and that got stuck trying to access that too so I tried to cancel that operation and it got stuck canceling that operation. I disconnected my network and it eventually gave up after throwing a few dialogs. I quit iTunes and reconnected my network. I relaunched iTunes, went straight to my account settings, logged in and resumed the download from there. Files are now downloading and not getting stuck in processing.
I won't bother trying to reason that.

Same issue here. iTunes has been "processing" a single download for 3 hours now on my system - We have multiple downloads that have failed and have burned hours of their support time. You'd think Apple would want to solve this. I have lists of songs I'd like to download but there's no point.

I'm amazed that this is still going on. No more iTunes downloads for me. Ran into the same problem the other day downloading one track. I initially had the problem months ago and had sworn off downloading music from iTunes, but wanted to buy an album, so I decided to give it a try again. No more.

Well, I'll be... Removed Verizon's vCast music manager from my PC and have now downloaded multiple albums without issue. Even, simultaneous track downloads now works. Why a program I never use was causing this problem, I can't explain. In reading through discussion entries, it looks like there is a Verizon process running even when the vCast program is not being used. Some suggested stopping that process berfore running iTunes, but since I have no need for the vCast music manager, I just removed it.

Same problem, downloading the full album of Mulholland Dr., where three tracks continue to be processing after 24 hours. I'm going to call AppleCare and request a full refund for this album, rather than a refund for those three tracks. Because I wasn't able to download the full album, I'm now going to instead purchase the full album from a different source.

By the way, this album was purchased on and downloaded to an iPhone 3G via a 3G wireless connection, and the problem continues to persist now that the iPhone is on a wifi broadband connection.

wow I bought a song off iTunes Painkiller by Judas Priest yesterday around 11 pm and now it is about 2 am and it is still processing and I cant play it this is rediculous!