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Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

iTunes causing constant freezes forcing reboot

I'm very frustrated lately with iTunes. I'm running version 10.1 but have been having a problem for the last several releases. I have about 56 gigs of music located on my iMac. I don't access any of it off an external drive. I'm finding that iTunes is randomly freezing which causes the whole computer to freeze as well. My mouse pointer still moves and sometimes the music will even keep playing, at least for a while, but everything else is unresponsive and clicking on any app causes the beach ball to start spinning. I can't force quit anything because the dock, the Apple menu and any utilities I have running are also frozen. The only recovery to to power down the machine. I've even left it frozen for an hour to see if it would eventually recover and it doesn't.

What's frustrating is that I can't figure out exactly what causes the freeze. Sometimes it happens with music playing and iTunes in the background. Other times it happens downloading apps or syncing my iPhone. It's to the point where anytime I use iTunes I have to close all my open applications and cross my fingers because chances are it will freeze at some point. I know some users are reporting freezes when they launch the app. This doesn't seem to be my problem. It launches fine and I'm able to use it but at some point if I keep it open, chances are it will freeze. I pretty much get in and get out and hope for the best.

Given that I have a large library and I don't want to loose all my album art, play counts, etc, I'm not sure what to do. I've done all the usual trouble shooting of deleting pref files, repairing disk permissions, etc but nothing has helped. At this point, I can't tell if something is corrupted or if there's a bug with iTunes itself. If it's a corruption, I'm not sure how to fix it without loosing anything (artwork, play counts, etc).

There seem to be a fair number of people reporting freeze problems but there doesn't seem to be a consistent cause or any real trouble shooting that has worked. I'm really at a loss. iTunes is great and I love listening to music but hard crashes are not good for my other applications and sooner or later it's going to cause corruption issues on the disk or with other applications. The problem seems to be getting worse too. It started off around the time I upgraded to Snow Leopard but was only happening occasionally. Now it happens constantly but again, only when iTunes is running.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

PS. If your suggestion is to reinstall my OS, thanks in advance but move along to the next post. That's not next in line as a trouble shooting step.

iMac 3.06 GHz 24", iPhone 3 GS, Mac OS X (10.6.5), 4 Gigs RAM

Posted on Nov 15, 2010 3:28 PM

56 replies

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Dec 20, 2010 5:00 PM in response to gitarzysta

Yes, some background services are running but I've also created a new user account where no background services run and have the same issue.

I think I've given up on trouble shooting this one and am going to do the dreaded OS reinstall. I ran TechTool and it keeps crashing doing a surface scan. That "could" be an indication of a back block somewhere although an app crashing isn't a good way to prove anything and TechTool needs to fix their software. Even so, if that's a possibility, I need to eliminate it. The only way to do that is to erase and zero out my hard drive to remap any bad blocks. Then I can reinstall Snow Leopard and see what happens. I reached this decision because now I'm finding my system is freezing without iTunes running at all (although iTunes helper always runs in the background). This was not the case before so either all this crashing has corrupted some files or maybe it's a disk issue that's getting worse.

I'm doing a fresh Time Machine backup so hopefully the reinstall will be fairly painless but it's a 1TB drive so the reformat and reinstall will definitely kill a few hours.

I'll post the results once I've had a chance to test it out.

Dec 20, 2010 6:49 PM in response to gitarzysta

I am always using Lil Snitch and an antivirus. I am often using Logmein. Though I am not one having issues. (Knock on wood.)

🙂 Sharin

Dec 25, 2010 3:54 AM in response to Eric D.

The purpose of this post is, unfortunately, not to provide a solution; rather, I want to outline a few of the things I did thus far to help document the issue.

First of all, I have to say that I only have the problem on my Mac Pro; on my MacBook Pro, where I use an exact copy of my iTunes library (just under 40 gigs with roughly 5700 tracks), things are just fine. It is the entire iTunes folder (located in the Music folder) that is identical, not just the library and music files.

I won't describe the symptoms here; they are identical to those reported by Eric D., the original poster.

First, I ran Disk Warrior. The utility did not report anything of significance. Next, I downloaded and re-applied the latest OS X combo update, thinking that something at the OS level might have been hosed. This did not fix anything. I then completely removed iTunes from my system using the procedure described in http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1224. Reinstalling iTunes from scratch did nothing, either: the system still froze.

While poring over the logs in an attempt to glean something useful, I saw that at one point, there had been a couple of I/O errors on my main disk drive. I did a surface scan with Drive Genius 3 (with the spare block option enabled), and the utility indeed returned the following:

Scanned 1,952,853,344 of 1,952,853,344 blocks. 0% (3) have been spared.

Notice: Block 1,313,388,798 at offset 672,455,064,576 has been spared.
Notice: Block 1,796,859,370 at offset 919,991,997,440 has been spared.
Notice: Block 1,823,686,410 at offset 933,727,441,920 has been spared.

To make sure no blocks had been removed from my iTunes files by the above, I recopied the entire iTunes folder from my MacBook Pro to my Mac Pro. I then ran Disk Warrior's File which revealed that no problem existed with any of the files on the disk. Needless to say, the problem persisted.

At this point, I made sure my Time Machine backup was up to date before booting the Mac Pro from a different internal disk and reformatting my main drive. I then rebooted from the Snow Leopard DVD and restored my main work drive from the Time Machine backup. Aside from taking a few hours, this did not do anything: the problem was still there. Incidentally, after every forced reboot following a freeze, I booted from a different drive to be able to do a volume repair. The response was always the same in that the file count is always off by 1:

Repairing volume...
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 1204650 instead of 1204651)
Invalid volume directory count
(It should be 309299 instead of 309298)
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Macintosh HD was repaired successfully.

Thinking about this mess, I realized that I did not remember when exactly it started. Did I have the problem with iTunes 9? I thought the frequency of the freezes was increasing, but when the first one occurred I could not recall. I removed iTunes 10.1.1 again using the same procedure mentioned above ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1224) and installed iTunes 9 again (it's available at http://support.apple.com/downloads/#iTunes). Because my library had bee used with a later version, it could not be used with iTunes 9. I therefore had to recreate it for version 9 while preserving my playlists. I did this using the procedure given here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1451. I launched iTunes; depressingly, it froze about ten seconds into playing the first track I tried. I repaired the volume, got rid of iTunes 9, and reinstalled iTunes 10.1.1.

This morning, I created a new admin account and copied my main account's iTunes folder to it. I've been using this new account to surf for a while, and all the while iTunes has been playing. I'm using Text Edit to type this summary, hitting command-s often (you can't be too careful). I'm starting to feel cautiously optimistic about this; true, it's only been a couple of hours, but lately iTunes has frozen in much less time than that when using my main account…

One of the more annoying consequences of this business is that it can affect the devices one syncs with iTunes. For example, iTunes froze in the middle of synchronizing my iPhone, and it left the phone in a corrupted state with half the apps missing. My only recourse was to restore the iPhone from a backup. Apple really needs to investigate the issue, but I suspect that it is not a high priority for them because it only appears to impact a small subset of users. Still, let's hope someone figures out the root cause soon.

Merry Christmas!

Daniel

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Dec 25, 2010 9:01 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel,

Thanks for the great post. It seems like we're both experiencing the same symptoms and have done much of the same troubleshooting. I haven't yet reinstalled my OS but that's my next step. I'm trying to clean up my hard drive first to reduce the size before I do the reinstall. I admit, I'm not confident that will fix anything. I might have bad blocks on my drive but am not sure because Tech Tool only crashes when I do a surface scan which may or may not mean anything. Even if there are bad blocks, that doesn't mean they are causing the freezes.

I too cannot say exactly when this problem started but what I've found is that it seems to be getting worse. It used to happen randomly and sometimes it took days before the problem surfaced. Now, if I launch iTunes it will only be a matter of minutes before my system freezes. One thing is clear, with iTunes running, a freeze is inevitable. What has thrown me off is that recently I experienced a couple freezes without iTunes running. This was not happening before so I'm puzzled unless things have gotten corrupted elsewhere on my system from all the iTunes related freezes.

My next two steps are to reinstall the OS and also move a copy of my entire library to another machine to see if I have any issues there. Overall this has been very frustrating because without logs or errors to help in trouble shooting, it's only guessing as to where the problem may exist.

One thing that's interesting is the problem happens in both older and newer versions of iTunes even though we know we didn't have this problem running older versions of iTunes in the past. That points towards something system related. It must be a conflict with something in Snow Leopard. Maybe a driver conflict of some kind but then again, you're a Mac Pro and I'm on an iMac.

Please keep us posted if you discover any solutions.

Dec 25, 2010 9:17 AM in response to Eric D.

Quick follow-up:

Can those who are having problems check what login-items they are running (under System Preferences, Accounts)? I have eliminated a number of them (not just by removing them from the list but also by deleting them from the disk so they don't get added in again when the system is rebooted), and so far, my system has been up and running with iTunes playing in the background without skipping a beat. I realize it's too early to say, but six hours without a hitch when it used to crash within twenty to thirty minutes at the most is at least a step in the right direction!

I removed items that are part of

- the Spyder3 color calibration software
- the Checkup system monitoring utility
- the RIM Blackberry synchronization software
- the Chronosync utility
- iTunes (the iTunes Helper thing)
- SIMBL

I'm not saying that any of these caused the problem; I am saying that by eliminating these items, my systems seems stable, so this is something those with problems may want to look into. None of the items I removed is needed for my purposes. For instance, the Spydersoftware was just a reminded to calibrate (I do this once every 6 weeks or so, usually before I get the reminder anyway). iTunes Helper is just a thing that launches iTunes when one plugs in a device (iPod, iPhone...), something I'd rather do myself anyway as I often plug in those devices just to charge them.

What's left in my list and does not seem to cause problems is the following:

- GrowlHelperApp
- PopChar
- DiskWarriorStarter
- DropBox
- LaunchNikon Message Center 2
- SophosUIServer (All Users)

I suggest that if you have iTunes freeze problems, you look into your login items. And yes, reboot after you've gotten rid of some of these and verify that they are truly gone when the system comes back up.

Hope this is useful to someone!

Daniel

Dec 25, 2010 1:11 PM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel,

It's true you could have had the file count inconsistency issue for a while and it has only now started to affect system operation.

It's a volume structure issue and I have found TechTool Pro to be very effective at fixing these types of errors when they occur. Though now my main purpose is to maintain the machine and not have to fix them. A couple of times, it's not been possible (even trying all my tricks) and I've had to erase and start over. I hope I've learned my lesson (and thank goodness for tie machine).

As for the freezing issue when syncing, what I've found is when I'm playing certain types of video, mP4 as opposed to mV4, my syncs with iPhone or iPods seem to stall a bit, along with the video and I often get that spinning beach ball for a few seconds.

🙂 Sharon

Dec 25, 2010 3:45 PM in response to Sharon Stead

Hi Sharon,

There are any number of programs out there that can deal with file count inconsistencies; I use Drive Genius or Disk Utility, and the result is the same. Of course it is possible that this problem could have existed a long time ago, but every time iTunes froze, I booted off my maintenance drive to run a volume repair, and every time the result was the same. Therefore, I consider it far more likely that the file count inconsistency is the result of a violent restart following an iTunes-induced general freeze of the system.

I'm not sure I understand what lesson you hope you learned; after all, it's not as if the people who are experiencing this iTunes freeze problem might have been able to prevent it by being more careful! Given the complexity of today's operating systems, you just can't avoid occasional problems. As long as you have good backups (and Time Machine alone is not enough, in my opinion), a means of booting into something other than your main drive, and you maintain your system, you're doing just about all that can be expected. It's not a guarantee against problems, but a good way to be prepared for them when they occur, and that's pretty much inevitable.

Finally, I never had problems with the synchronization of my two iPods and my iPhone, except that one time during an iTunes freeze. Under normal conditions, I have not observed stalls or rotating beach balls during synchronization, no matter what video formats were involved. You may have a different issue there that may be worth investigating.

Daniel

Dec 25, 2010 6:58 PM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel,

The lesson learned for me has been regular preventive maintenance can prevent issues that may be very difficult to fix later. It just takes time, and every time I go to do it, I think "everything's working great, I don't need to do this now." I just need to remember to not take the easy way out and not do it because I don't need it. Rather, I need need to perform the maintenance so I don't need it!

Regardless of the platform, I've seen one trick work for one person that doesn't work for another. Certainly true on the windows based machines at work--what our support person refers to as "job security." 🙂 My guess is that we all have so many different applications and scripts and the like running, that one fix may not fix all. And that's without considering the bots and other tracking files that may be lurking and doing goodness knows what as they transmit information. (Who knew that "Dictionary.com" was rated by the WSJ as "highly exposing" visitors to privacy issues--i used to use it all the time!)

As for the video format, that's the only inconsistency I've found, as soon as I convert the files, no more issue. I've changed most of them over--I say most because every now and again I find an old one I want to watch and therefore convert it before doing so. Strange, but one of those idiosyncrasies I've seen on my computer.

I absolutely agree that Time Machine, while very handy, is not enough. I maintain incremental backups of everything in addition to Time Machine, except iTunes, which is backed up intact. I just feel better, for some reason, if my music and video is backed up "whole" instead of just the changes being added. One of my idiosyncrasies, I guess! But I'm OK with that!

🙂 Sharon

Dec 25, 2010 8:39 PM in response to Eric D.

im trying to sync my new ipod touch to my itunes, and it gets to the 6th song and stops resonding.. whats the deal?

El Deanio

Level 3

805 points

Dec 26, 2010 8:12 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel Kiechle wrote:
Quick follow-up:

Can those who are having problems check what login-items they are running (under System Preferences, Accounts)? I have eliminated a number of them (not just by removing them from the list but also by deleting them from the disk so they don't get added in again when the system is rebooted), and so far, my system has been up and running with iTunes playing in the background without skipping a beat. I realize it's too early to say, but six hours without a hitch when it used to crash within twenty to thirty minutes at the most is at least a step in the right direction!

I removed items that are part of

- the Spyder3 color calibration software
- the Checkup system monitoring utility
- the RIM Blackberry synchronization software
- the Chronosync utility
- iTunes (the iTunes Helper thing)
- SIMBL

I'm not saying that any of these caused the problem; I am saying that by eliminating these items, my systems seems stable, so this is something those with problems may want to look into. None of the items I removed is needed for my purposes. For instance, the Spydersoftware was just a reminded to calibrate (I do this once every 6 weeks or so, usually before I get the reminder anyway). iTunes Helper is just a thing that launches iTunes when one plugs in a device (iPod, iPhone...), something I'd rather do myself anyway as I often plug in those devices just to charge them.

What's left in my list and does not seem to cause problems is the following:

- GrowlHelperApp
- PopChar
- DiskWarriorStarter
- DropBox
- LaunchNikon Message Center 2
- SophosUIServer (All Users)

I suggest that if you have iTunes freeze problems, you look into your login items. And yes, reboot after you've gotten rid of some of these and verify that they are truly gone when the system comes back up.

Hope this is useful to someone!

Daniel

Well after quite some time of no re-occurrence of the iTunes spinning beach ball jobby it happened again. This time I had no other apps open at all (at least none in the Dock). All I was doing was changing from 'List View' to 'Cover View' mode.

Reading both your posts, the only common app. that I share with you, Eric D, is iTunes Helper.

I have been having problems with my iPod Touch booting iPhoto when I plug it in and I was going to post to ask how I change this Default to either iTunes or nothing at all rather than iPhoto when I read your post saying that “iTunes Helper is just a thing that launches iTunes when one plugs in a device (iPod, iPhone...), something I'd rather do myself”.

So I used Spotlight to open iTunes Helper. The only thing I found was that iTunes Helper opened Photoshop instead of iTunes as I expected. I don’t know why. I tried again with the same result and it seems the iTunes Helper plist is involved.

See my screen shot. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11373233/Screen%20shot%202010-12-26%20at%2014.53.25.png

I have just moved these files to the Desktop

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11373233/Screen%20shot%202010-12-26%20at%2015.59.39.png -

to see if iTunes works better without them.

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Dec 26, 2010 12:10 PM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel,

In my login items I have:

Dropbox
EyeTV Helper
Clips
SophosUIServer

I also have the following PrefPanes running

Default App
Divx
Flip4Mac
Growl
MacFuse
Perian
SpiceRack
TechTool Protection

Finally, these programs are also loading in the background but don't show up in my Login Items:

1PasswordAgent
Drobo Dashboard
Sophos

I'm not too concerned with 1Password, Drobo or Dropbox since all were installed after experiencing the problems. I'm going to try disabling all the rest to see what happens.

Finally...one interesting thing I noticed yesterday. I booted up my iMac, quit all running programs except iTunes and enabled Home Sharing. I was able to play music all afternoon using a different Mac accessing my iTunes library. Not once did my machine freeze. That might just prove what we already suspect in that there's nothing wrong with the library itself as it works fine from other machines if you move it or access it.

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Dec 29, 2010 9:31 PM in response to Eric D.

So...a quick update on the continuing saga. Today I took the plunge and reformatted my hard drive. I zeroed out the entire drive in case there was an issue with bad blocks (I read that zeroing out the drive during the formatting process will remap any bad blocks). Then I restored my system from my Time Machine back-up. A pretty slick process to be sure but the exercise took almost an entire day to complete.

When my system was up and running, I did notice some immediate improvements in speed and responsiveness. Clearly all this crashing had taken a toll on something because I was starting to get beach balls doing just about everything from scrolling in a Finder window to opening up a web page. After the reformat and restore, I haven't noticed any.

I launched iTunes and started to play around. I went for about 20 minutes before I got a beach ball. Interestingly, the beach ball went away after about a minute and I had still had control of my computer enough so that I could quit Safari which was running in the background. However, I started to get messages in iTunes that it couldn't read or write to the iTunes Library file. I also noticed little exclamation points pop up next to many of the songs. Poking around further, I discovered the Finder was actually frozen and I could not get access to my hard disk (which iTunes probably couldn't either and that's why I got the errors and exclamation marks).

I then noticed the clock stopped moving and then everything froze up forcing me to do a hard reboot. It very frustrating to spend the kind of time I've had to put in backing things up, reformatting and restoring only to be right back where I started. To be fair, if the problem was with some software that got corrupted, restoring from backup simply restored the same problem that was there before. This exercise was more to figure out if it was a hard drive issue and it doesn't appear to be.

My next step is the reformat once again but this time, I will not restore from Time Machine but install from DVD and then use the Setup Assistant to migrate my accounts and data over. Then I can test iTunes on a clean system with no other software installed. This is taking a huge amount of time to trouble shoot but I'm not sure I have any other options.

Dec 30, 2010 3:17 AM in response to Eric D.

Eric,

Sorry to hear that after going through all this trouble, you are still having problems. On my end, I had been running without any problems since my last post when yesterday, my system froze again. The only thing is... iTunes wasn't running at the time! The symptoms were identical: a gradual, but rather quick loss of control over the machine until forcing a reboot was the only recourse.

Checking the logs revealed a number of I/O issues with the drive. I had seen this before (albeit to a lesser extent), and I had gone through the procedure of formatting my drive, as stated in my first post in this thread. The only difference is that I did not have the option to zero the blocks enabled. This had not solved my problem, either. I had later used Drive Genius to scan the entire disk, and the utility had found three bad blocks.

My conclusion at this point is that I do have a hardware problem. Perhaps the login items I removed were tying to load something from a part of the disk that was bad, and that may be why the issue disappeared for a while when I disabled them. That would actually make sense because the very same login items are enabled on my laptop, and there I have no problems at all.

Whatever the answer is, I won't get any further until I replace my main drive. I've ordered a replacement yesterday, and, it will arrive tomorrow morning. I will then do a restore from Time Machine and see where that takes me.

I you are getting messages that iTunes cannot read from or write to the iTunes library file, I very much suspect that you have a drive issue as well. Check the logs in the Console around the time this occurred. You can also quit all running apps and to try to duplicate these two files:

iTunes Music Library.xml
iTunes Library

If this works, it won't prove much, but if it doesn't and the Finder becomes unresponsive (either for a few minutes or permanently), you know that you have an issue with your drive. Until you are able to completely discard any possibility that your drive may be acting up, I very strongly suggest that you not reinstall your entire system again.

Dec 30, 2010 3:22 AM in response to firefighting_babe

You're in a "Using iTunes for Mac" forum; try posting in the Windows forum if you're running XP.

Daniel

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Dec 30, 2010 6:24 AM in response to Daniel Kiechle

Daniel,

It's interesting that you now too are having freezes outside iTunes. For the longest time my freezes were confined to when iTunes was running and I had no issues when it was not. Then, just like you, the issues suddenly started happening even when iTunes was closed. Very strange indeed.

I too wonder if this is hardware related. I've had my fair share of hard drive failures over time so it wouldn't surprise me. What's puzzling however is that in ever other respect, the hard drive seems to be fine. In preparation for my reinstall, I offloaded almost 500 GB of data to an external drive without any issues. Then I zeroed out the drive (twice actually by mistake) and that wrote data to every block on the drive with no issues. It shows and both reads and writes are working. Given all that I/O activity, why would the problem show up almost exclusively when running iTunes? Seems odd. If the drive was failing, I'd expect problems everywhere.

I'm not disagreeing that this may be an I/O problem but I'm wondering if somehow iTunes is crashing some kind of I/O service in Snow Leopard. Once the service dies, everything becomes unresponsive because no data can be read from the drive. This might explain why sometimes the freeze is immediate and other times, you get some control for a few minutes. Things that are in memory and don't need the drive might continue to work until more data is needed. All of this is pure speculation as I don't have any proof but it makes sense.

My machine is covered under AppleCare so if the drive turns out to be the problem, I'm sure they'll replace it without any issues. The reason I want to try a clean install is that if this problem exists because some system file has become corrupted, my restore would have simply put that corrupt file back. A clean install with no other software running should help narrow down if this is a drive related or an iTunes bug.

Since you've already ordered a new drive, I'll be interested to hear if that fixes your problem. As I mentioned, my restore definitely speed up my machine and appeared to address the spinning beach balls that were appearing elsewhere but that could simply be because caches were not restored and are fresh.

Thanks for continuing to post.

iTunes causing constant freezes forcing reboot