Itunes download error "You do not have enough access privileges for this operation" operation"

Double-click on your user file ("Robyn" or whatever) within your hard drive (to do this: double-click your hard drive icon on your desktop, then double-click the folder called "Users," then double click your "user file," which you titled when you first got your computer: "Robyn" or whatever). Then you should see a list of folders that includes "Music." Single-click this (just single-click), just to highlight it (not to open it). Thus, you should now be looking at the list of folders that includes "Music," with the "Music" folder highlighted. Now, go to "File" at the top line of your screen and drop down to select "Get Info." Then follow the rest of my instructions in my first post in this discussion.

I hope that does it for you!

Bill,

I often have the same issue. I just looked at my itunes folder and noticed that some of the songs I recently purchased from my computer were showing up outside their folder. For example, I downloaded "Too Close" by Alex Clare. The song was located on its own in the "itunes media" folder and nothing was located in the "Alex Clare/The Lateness of the Hour" folder. I double clicked on the music file and it disappeared. It showed up in the Alex Clare/Lateness of the Hour folder. I did that for all the other rogue music files that were listed under "itunes media." I tried to sync, and it worked without getting the access privileges error.

I have same problem as Bill... have tried the suggestions in this thread and still get that danged error message.

What this means is that I get no new podcasts, which renders my iPod useless and my iPhone less useful.

Super frustrating... have spent several hours trying to figure this out.
Does anyone think that deleting iTunes entirely and reinstalling it would work? My fear is that I have some old tracks burned from CDs in my library, and that I might lose them?

I am really missing my weekly does of This American Life and RadioLab.

Arrghh.

Oh happy day. I now have Ira back in my life.

Anyway, while the "Read Write" fix by itself didn't work by itself, I was able to get this fixed finally. Here's how:

1) I found this post: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1277?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US about shared folders, screwed up my courage and went into Terminal and pasted in the 'sudo..." command.

2) Then I went to the music folder, checked privilges were at "read write" and hit the update on the gear menu.

3) Then I restarted my mac.

4) I opened iTunes, clicked on refresh podcasts and it worked.

I don't know about dents in the universe, but this kind of crap is really putting a dent in my view of Apple. Problems that show up out of nowhere are not what I expect from the supposed design leader. Recent comments/reviews of the new OS have me concerned that they have some real issues on the software side these days. Bug free, user friendly, rock solid... that isn't Apple, that's Dropbox.

We have the exact same issue. I've tried every possible resolution, chenged permissions, took ownership of the directories, command line. My wife finally decided to give up on iTunes and is buying stuff from Amazon and Google music from now on. This is really annoying.

I've been a faithful apple user for the last 10 years, but enough is enough. We both decided to buy Androids and will probably end up getting Windows 8 laptops. We are done with Apple, it's not the same it used to me. The new software just *****. Sorry Apple, you've gotten too big. And I know I am not alone in being dissatisfied. All Apple carss about is making money. They've turned their backs on their customers. Guess what? You will slowly decline, because we're on to you. Build inferior crap, just care about profit, and guess what, we will all leave.

I had this same error after creating a backup image of my boot drive. But I had not included the "Shared" folder on the destination disk. iTune uses, and requires, access to this shared folder for temporary files to support the sharing capabilities. This Shared folder is the one that is parallel (or at the same level as) your personal folder just under the Users folder on your main drive. Make sure that folder exists, and everyone has read/write permission there.

- jw -

Tried fixing the "Shared" folder permissions as well, it didn't fix the issue. Maybe the right chmod at the command line might work. But of course, no peep from any Apple support person as to the right approach.

Dude you rock, I've been f'in witht this for the last few hours.

I had the same problem, I solved it applying read/write permissions for me on my whole user folder (HD/users/your name) and enclosed items , not only on the music folder. Note : doing this will change all permissions of all elements in this folder, you may not want this (exemple : you may have to set back public/dropbox to "write only" for everyone if you want to keep using it).

This one worked for me. Turns out I had tampered with the "Shared" folder's priviledges via Terminal my self. Thanks a lot. :-)

FC--you rock! 😉 The article you linked saved me the agony of messing with this @#$%! any longer...just did my first restore from a [small] Time Machine backup volume, only to find I had lost ALL my itunes music [prolly didn't include in the small backup--Thank God I had a copy of most? of the library in another disk/OS version...

Anyways, been messing with this crapola too long, and it's time to cozy up with a brewsky and relax for now; CHEERS! to you

thanks fcphun!!!
I also had the exact same problem that bill. I have my itunes media in an external drive and the problem wouldn´t solve changing the access privileges of the external drive folders. I wanted to cry for a while but then I notice that the share folder on my computer hadn´t the read/write privileges activated. I change them the old fashioned way and everything is working now. Thanks man.

Here's another fix: When I got my first iPhone, I created an album in iPhoto that contained photos I wanted on the iPhone. I told iTunes to sync photos with that album. Fast forward several years, I started using Aperture. Still no problem until Apple "unified" the databases for iPhoto and Aperture. Recently I decided to clean up the Aperture/iPhoto library and noticed some duplicate items. Guess what, they were the albums I'd created in iPhoto to sync with. I deleted those albums. Then on the next iTunes sync I began getting the "you do not have enough access privileges for this operation" message. I tried several of the suggested permissions fixes for the Finder and the Aperture/iPhoto databases, but nothing worked. Then I noticed the error message popped up when iTunes was trying to sync the photos. I told iTunes not to sync any photos but to keep the current photos on the iPhone. Now the iTunes sync works to install app updates, podcasts, music, etc. Later I'll go back to figure out how to recreate the photo syncing albums so I can add new photos to the iPhone.

I downgraded from Mavericks to Mountain Lion (time machine restore) today and received the error.

By creating a /Users/shared directory with full read/write/execute (777) privilege this instantly fixed the problem for me.

Strange. I do not remember deleting my shared directory. You will need to lookup how to get root (sudo) permission in OS X. Then do this:

cd /Users

sudo mkdir shared

ls -l

sudo chmod 777 shared

ls -l

You should see (all accounts + shared):

drwxr-xr-x@ 56 jerry staff 1904 Nov 6 18:38 jerry

drwxrwxrwx 4 root admin 136 Nov 6 19:04 shared

The drwxrwxrwx allows anyone to create directories or add files in shared. Here is what iTunes created under shared:

drwxrwxrwx@ 2 jerry admin 68 Nov 6 19:04 SC Info

drwxrwxrwx@ 2 jerry admin 68 Nov 6 19:04 adi

Nothing in either directory (I looked for hidden with ls -la). A mystery..

Had the same problem after a OS X.9 Timemachine restore. Here's how I fixed it:

Hold down the Option key while starting iTunes

Reselect your own iTunes Library

When I did this, it opened right up and started "Updating the iTunes Library"

It was correctly pointed to the correct Library before but this did the trick.