iTunes Artwork Screensaver Black or Blank

Same issue here. The xml file checked out just fine. Did a sort of all items in library, and found that a few iphone voice memos were at the top of the list. Removed those, and screen saver is functional again. I probably have an apostrophe in the name, however, I didn't try editing them, I just removed them.

Wow, I can't believe after not having my screensaver work for seven months it was because of Voice Memos imported from my iPhone. I deleted all of them and my album artwork screensaver works again. Thanks everyone.

Yep - I had voice memos in my library too. I deleted them all & BOOM! I've put one back that I wanted & it's still ok, so I'm now happy. 🙂

The voice memo syncing from my iPhone was the cause of my screen saver not working. Deleted the voice memos and it's working again.

Friggin voice memo's .... can't believe how easy this solution was.

There are several other threads with unresolved/more complex solutions ... but this one worked for me.

Thanks everyone !

After all the hoops I jumped through from other threads on this, I can't believe this was the cause of the problem but the it is now solved. Glad.

This doesn't seem to be working for me. How do I find the voice memos? I used a smart folder, couldn't find any. Found one 8hz file, deleted it, closed iTunes, used the Alt-Key to open iTunes. Screen saver worked. Rebooted Mac. Now it doesn't work any more.

How do I find voicememos in iTunes? There is no Voice Memos folder in my iTunes Music folder in Finder.

Just create a Smart Playlist in iTunes with the Match Rule of Media Kind is Voice Memo.

>Just create a Smart Playlist in iTunes with the Match Rule of Media Kind is Voice Memo.

I did that. There's nothing there. Just got done repairing disc permissions after booting from Restore partition. Same thing. The only new thing in my library are two TV shows I downloaded yesterday. I copied them to my MacBook Air as a test. It did not mess up the Air. The screen saver works fine on the Air.

I spent something like 10-20 hours rebuiding both these machines' iTunes libraries from the Cloud two months ago to fix this problem. Now it's back, on my MacBook Pro. Driving me nuts.

Does anyone have a list of the "weird" (illegal) characters that cause this bug?

I also had the same problem since updating to Mountain Lion. I have since deleted the voice memos that came over from iphone and hey presto it now works again!

Have you verified the XML/UTF-8 aspects of your iTunes library file? Export it via File>Library>Export Library & then use a (free) programmer's editor like TextWrangler or Komodo Edit to highlight syntax or illegal character errors. Then, if there are not too many, you can fix the meta-data of the items within iTunes which correspond with the errors. If there are a lot of errors, then you're best off fixing the errors in the exported file & then replacing your library file by importing the corrected XML via the somewhat mis-named File>Library>Import Playlist...

Have a look at the earlier posts in this thread for a more expanded description of this procedure.

I hope Apple give some attention to this most ungraceful bug which is causing a lot of people frustration and wasted time. It cost me (as it turns out) unneccessary loss of playlist data.

I had to restore my iPhone last week, to unblock it. As suggested above I looked for voice memos, found four, deleted them and Voila!, the ScreenSaver works again. I think all voice memos start with the persons name and apostrophe, and will be a common issue when the iPhone is restored. For some reason the voice memos are not transferred to iTunes during a regular sync, but are transferred when restoring. I am sending an email on this to Apple Support, who tried to help me via my AppleCare, but could not be of any assistance after an hour of help.

Thanks to this support thread I solved the problem in a few minutes.

Regards,

Jim

gamcall wrote:

Have you verified the XML/UTF-8 aspects of your iTunes library file? Export it via File>Library>Export Library & then use a (free) programmer's editor like TextWrangler or Komodo Edit to highlight syntax or illegal character errors. Then, if there are not too many, you can fix the meta-data of the items within iTunes which correspond with the errors. If there are a lot of errors, then you're best off fixing the errors in the exported file & then replacing your library file by importing the corrected XML via the somewhat mis-named File>Library>Import Playlist...

Have a look at the earlier posts in this thread for a more expanded description of this procedure.

I downloaded TextWrangler. I opened the exported iTunes library file with the UTF-8 option. I can't find a way to open it or check its XML aspects.

Once I open the file, the "Check Syntax" option under the #! dropmenu menu is greyed out.

The TextWrangler Help has absolutely no mention of the the Check Syntax command.

How do I check the syntax of the file using this program? None of the earlier postings in this thread talk about how to use TextWrangler to do the procedure.

It looks like a reasonable program, but the feature I need the most is greyed out, and I have no idea why.

The manual says "This command is only available for Perl and Python scripts." They've got to be kidding!

I have no idea how to get this program to flag the bad syntax.

Searching for "Syntax" in the Help manual expects me to use Grep. If I was up to speed on grep and Terminal, I'd use that and not bother downloading TextWrangler.