iTunes library keeps getting damaged - any ideas?

Question

iTunes library keeps getting damaged - any ideas?

Hi,

Every couple of days I fire up iTunes on my iMac and I get the message that the library has been damaged and needs to be rebuilt which is a painful process of reimporting everything and waiting for iTunes to chew through all the processes before I can listen to any music.

I used to keep my iTunes library on an external drive, so I moved it to the iMac's boot disk just in case it was caused by a delay in spinning up the drive. It didn't, the library reported itself damaged the very next time I fired up iTunes. I can't find any faults on my machine and there are no issues with other software. It's iTunes that seems to be broken.

I've tried copying and renaming one of the older library (.itl) files from the Previous iTunes Libraries, all of my music not purchased from iTunes is missing from the listing and my iTunes downloads all have the little cloud symbol next to them suggesting they need to be downloaded again. As far as I can tell, all my files are on the drive.

So - does anyone know:

What's causing it?

How do I stop it?

I'm running up-to-date Mavericks on my iMac and iTunes is 11.2.2 (3)

Thanks,

Mike.

Posted on Jul 10, 2014 1:47 PM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

411,109 points

Jul 10, 2014 3:21 PM in response to Mike Richards2

Seeing as yours is the first post I have seen along these lines in about a month and there's millions of iTunes users I somehow don't think it is an iTunes bug.

It seems you have done some moving of your "library" but I'd say in about 75% of the cases where people say they have moved their "library" they have not done so correctly, so that's an open channel.

I guess it is possible there's an issue with your drive and/or directory. This is an old-fashioned suggestion but have you run Disk Utility to verify your drive and permissions?

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