What are these thousands of iTunes .tmp files ?

Question

Level 1

4 points

What are these thousands of iTunes .tmp files ?

Trying to consolidate my iTunes files from different backup drives and am finding .tmp files everywhere. I have a huge library and I'm not sure why these are created and left behind. It makes me nervous to just delete them. How can I prevent this from happening in the future. Anyone know what is causing this?

Win10 PC

Latest version of iTunes

Majority of music was ripped from CDs

Plus quite a bit of purchased CD albums downloaded from Amazon autoripped

Quite a few odd songs from Amazon Downloader

80+ Audible books downloaded

50+ books from CDs ripped

Posted on Oct 9, 2019 2:23 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

turingtest2

Level 10

278,363 points

Oct 10, 2019 8:18 AM in response to kaywrensnest

Typically this is an interaction between iTunes and third party security software. When iTunes updates the database it writes out a new temporary copy, then deletes the original file and renames the temporary file to replace it. Security software may try to temporarily hold up the process while it checks the files are safe, but iTunes doesn't have any steps to confirm that its requests were completed and doesn't try again. Exclude the iTunes folder from real time scanning and discard the .tmp files that you have found.

tt2

Reply

What are these thousands of iTunes .tmp files ?

Similar questions