iTunes Artwork Screensaver Black or Blank

I guess I need a XML validator first before I use TextWrangler? Not sure who offers a good one, and I'm loathe to go back to Bare Bones for another program, since TextWrangler has been so disappointing.

Yep - if Apple aren't mining the discussions data they're missing out on a big resource.

You simply need to select "XML" from the language pop-up at the bottom left of the window. That will then colour-code the syntactic elements of the language selected, but unfortunately not *validate* it. I actually used ActiveState's Komodo edit, which does on the fly syntax validation. Sorry for the bum steer. In TextWrangler, searching for syntax brings up grep because there's the term "grep syntax"; i.e. the syntax grep uses. I don't think they're expecting you to use grep to validate XML, although, if you were a regex guru, you could. Don't think badly of TextWrangler - it's a great program, as is its big brother, BBEdit.

So, you can get Komodo Edit, or, as I said in my previous post, refer back in the thread where the poster tells you how to use xmllint & vim in Terminal to find syntax errors . I didn't actually use that process as I had some questions of my own about the process & he didn't get back to me about them. As I said also, even after I'd validated the syntax of the library XML, it was the voice memos which were the real culprits for me.

After reading this... I Iooked back at my library...saw I had three voice memos that were recently imported. Deleted those buggers and all of the sudden the test screen worked...exited there and the screen saver works...da*n voice memos!!!

thx

Mine worked after I did 2 things. Which of the two fixed it I don't know. Updated to Lion and also found 3 voice memos that I deleted. I then went to screen saver. Clicked off of iTunes art work then back on to it. Tested it and it worked.

Deleted iPhone voice memos from Music and the screensaver kicked back into life.

Cheers!

Can you tell me how you found the phone messages? I have my library on an external harddrive and not sure hoe to get to the right place to see if there are phine messages in itunes.

thanks!

I think they were listed as voice memos.....not much else..if your screensaver just stopped they should be at the top of the list if sorted by recently added...

They were really short duration as well..

Hi Shaun,

thanks for your input. Can you tell me if i need to actually go into itunes and scroll through my files to see the voice messages?

Is that how they are listed in itunes?

Thanks,

Brian

Yup. Just load up itunes, sort by recently added, and hopefully they're at the top of the list!

Or - make a smart playlist based on media kind = "voice memo".

YES! The process of deleting my iPhone's voice memos cleared up the screen saver issue.

I had even renamed some songs that contained valid characters (upside down question mark from Spanish) to no avail. But I found my voice memos were named "Mark Thacker's Memo" or something like that.

Deleted and restarted iTunes holding down the option key (just for fun) and re-chose my existing library.

Launched the screen saver and everythign is fine.

Note tha this is running iTunes 10.7 and MacOS X 10.8.2 on a MacBook Pro.

Thanks for the hint - wasn't looking forward to editing a bunch of XML today!

Wow... been living with this for a while. Just deleted the voice memos and voila! instantly working again!

Thanks!!!!!

Yep. Deleting voice memos solved it for me, too. And, just to be clear: I have tons of Portuguese music with special characters downloaded directly from iTunes. That was not the problem. (Still may be the problem for others, but it wasn't the problem for me.) I deleted the voice memos while in iTunes, then shut down iTunes, and then checked the screensaver: Voila! Everything worked again. It may have been special characters within the voice memos, I suppose, but it was not the special characters for "normal" music tracks. I still have all of them, special characters and all, but everything now works fine. Thanks to all for the fix.

Another note: You may have more than one area with voice memos. I found a playlist called "voice memos" and deleted that, and there were separate files in the recently added files section with the same voice memos. If you delete the latter, it should take care of the files in the playlist and solve the problem. Deleting the playlist alone may not be sufficient since the files still exist outside of the playlist.

Same problem. In my case ithe offending file was a PDF. Removed it and the screensaver works again.