Using Music app with 7.1.1 causes you to mysteriously run out of space

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Using Music app with 7.1.1 causes you to mysteriously run out of space

Music app in 7.1.1 minimally generates a crash report every time; it’s opened, a purchased or iTunes Match song is either streamed or fetched from the cloud, or played from a copy on the ios device, or when any of the control buttons are pressed [play, pause, skip, back], or is interrupted by Siri, or is restarted.

Each crash report, which can be viewed in Settings -> General -> About Diagnostics & Usage, does take up space. Listen to enough music and you will get a popup error message indicating you, mysteriously, ran out of space. It’s mysterious because if you were to add up the amount of space all the apps are using, Settings -> General -> Usage the Storage XX.X GB Used, is far more than the sum total of all the apps listed.

The only way I’ve been able to reclaim my real free space has been to reduce the size of all the crash reports by doing a hard reset . . . press and hold the button on the top edge and home button until the apple logo reappears on the screen. I’ve had to repeat this each time I get the out of space popup.

So, this being graduation season, if you rely on your ios device to take any snaps or videos of the end of the year school events. Be forewarned. You’re going to be sorely disappointed when all these hidden crash reports consume all available memory and thus prevent you from recording those once in a lifetime moments.

iPod touch (5th generation), iOS 7.1.1

Posted on May 15, 2014 8:31 AM

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lllaass

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May 15, 2014 9:52 AM in response to peter^

It is normal (sadfully) to have numerous crash reports). A lot occur because of low memory (the 5G has 512 MB) and resetting reclaims memory)

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Answer 2

peter^ Author

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May 15, 2014 10:56 AM in response to lllaass

Illass,

Thank you for your comments! The ios dev is a 32GB dev. The crash reports consumed all the available free space on the dev, which was over 10.5GB. A peek inside the crash reports shows that the crashed thread is always the itunescloudd process with a KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS 0x00000000 exception.

Buffer overrun?? Apple???

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Answer 3

lllaass

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210,417 points

May 15, 2014 11:08 AM in response to peter^

OK, I thought you meant memory not storage.

I would make an appointment at the Genius Bar of an Apple store since it appears you have a hardware problem. Maybe some bad storage or memory locations

Apple Retail Store - Genius Bar

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Answer 4

peter^ Author

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May 15, 2014 11:25 AM in response to lllaass

Illaass,

I had the dev swapped out yesterday at a Genius Bar. It came with ios 7.1. Because of this I was able to isolate the fact that the itunescloudd doesn't crash in 7.1. But consistently crashes in 7.1.1.

I posted my observations of the mysterious storage loss here so that others who have the same experience can; check and see if they have similar itunescloudd crash reports, how to temporarily free up space if they do, and make another inroad into apple eng. Hopefully I’ve put enough keywords in my post that their webcrawler will take this back to them!

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Answer 5

Carloleg

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May 18, 2014 3:08 AM in response to peter^

hello, I also have the same problem with iphone 4 and ipad 2 and ios 7.1.1 like you are full of reports about itunescloudd I have already reported the problem without solution in the forum:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6169735

I really hope that Apple will solve this unpleasant situation.........

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Answer 6

Jun 21, 2014 1:44 PM in response to Carloleg

if it's a device problem, then I need 5 replacing! We have 3 iPad minis, an iPod touch 5th gen and an iPhone 4s 64Gb in our household and they all have this problem!

if you use any app that streams data, especially the music app, you have to hard reset the device after a few hours of use! The iPhone has 25Gb of free space and this reduces to less than 10Gb after only a 1 hour car journey streaming music from iTunes Match.

Apple please acknowledge that there is a problem and develop a fix! This can't be a hardware fault!

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Answer 7

druxxx

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Aug 8, 2014 1:31 AM in response to peter^

exactly the same problem here on two iPhone4s and an iPad2. I forwarded this thread to an Apple support guy here in Germany to show him that I'm not the only one with this weird problem...

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Answer 8

peter^ Author

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Aug 23, 2014 10:50 AM in response to peter^

An update . . . have provided enough information to apple engineering so that they have been able to recreate the bug at will. The bug lies in the inability of a portion of the music app, itunescloudd, to properly communicate with the iMatch server. Under a variety of circumstances itunescloudd crashes. During each crash a lengthy crash report is written to the ipod. Because the app crashes so frequently, and because the crash report mechanism was designed rather poorly, the crash reports will eventually use up all the available free space on the ipod. Which is especially problematic when you know how much music and photos you have on your touch and then go and choose to use the touch to take an important video. And then can't take the video because a hidden apple app consumed all available storage space without your knowledge or permission.

Have since learned that by rebooting the touch, hold down the home button and button on the top edge until the apple logo appears. Will delete the contents of the crash reports and free up most all of the space consumed by the poorly designed crash report mechanism. And to remove all artifacts of the crash reports you'll need to sync the touch with the iTunes app after either adding or deleting and app, or song or video from the touch using iTunes. This forces the crash reports to be deleted from the ios device. But the space on the touch only remains free until the music app (itunescloudd) starts crashing again. Then you have to repeat either of these two steps.

Am purposefully not listing all the different ways I encountered the itunescloudd crashing so that apple eng will focus on correcting the root cause. And they ought to fix their weak crash reporting mechanism as well, and not allow it to consume all available free space on the ios device.

A final observation. This bug doesn't manifest itself on an iPhone (5/5S) w/ 7.1.1 or 7.1.2. Not sure about ipads and there might be a difference between the behavior on an ipad with just wifi versus one with wireless broadband access.

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