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Level 1

9 points

iTunes 12 stops responding and crashes almost constantly

Product info:

Late 2011 Macbook Pro, running Yosemite 10.10.1 with iTunes 12.0.1.26. I have installed all updates.

The Problem:

iTunes becomes unresponsive for at least 30 seconds and then frequently crashes after I request simple operations (like marking a podcast as played or unplayed, deleting a single episode of a podcast, switching between the tabs of the podcast section (between “My Podcasts” and “My Stations”), and switching between the Podcast and Music sections. Almost everything I do causes iTunes to stop responding and/or crash. I mostly use it for managing podcasts and syncing my iPod, so I haven’t noticed these problems with other areas of iTunes.

The application also doesn’t render properly when scrolling down through a list of media, so that some lines of text are split or duplicated until I wave the cursor over each line.

The application has become completely unusable, and I’m not sure what to do. When I was still running Mavericks (I upgraded to Yosemite last week with a clean install), I downgraded to iTunes 11 to fix the problems. The software was functional, but iTunes consumed a lot of CPU and memory according to Activity Monitor, and often the Macbook’s fan would start spinning when I used iTunes. The system update notifier also kept nagging me to update iTunes daily, and I got tired of that too.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes 12, with no improvement (but I didn’t use a cleaner program to strip all associated files, so there might be something I missed). I also moved my iTunes library itl and xml files to the desktop and re-created the library by importing the xml file. That took several hours and made no difference.

I have saved the text from the latest crash report, in case all or part of it would be helpful.

Any suggestions? I'm pretty frustrated here, and I'm starting to look for alternatives to iTunes.

MacBook Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)

Posted on Jan 18, 2015 10:16 PM

21 replies

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jan 20, 2015 6:24 PM in response to Sam from CA

Move the library aside. Don't rebuild it; create a new one and import your content stepwise, testing after each step. Eventually you should find out what's causing the problem.

Sam from CA Author

Level 1

9 points

Jan 20, 2015 8:16 PM in response to Linc Davis

I'm working on that now. The first thing I did after moving the library to the desktop and restarting iTunes was to log in to my iTunes account and check the "Sync podcasts" box. After iTunes downloaded my podcast subscriptions and stations, the problem started right away, even worse than before. I deleted all the podcasts, and it seems to be working again, so I'm importing a few things at a time. I'll report back after I've imported all my media, or before then if I find an obvious problem with one file.

Thank you for being patient and walking me through this. It's much better than blindly trying whatever random pieces of advice I can find by googling.

derico

Level 1

0 points

Jan 22, 2015 11:03 AM in response to Sam from CA

Hey Sam,

your last comments gave me an idea:

I deactivated Podcast Sync on my Mac and quit iTunes
On my iPhone I went through the podcast subscriptions and deleted all those without new episodes for quite a while. That way I tried to get rid of podcasts which might cause problems or are just obsolete.
Then I launched iTunes on the Mac and made sure sections other than podcasts are working fine - which they did.
Anxiously I switched to the podcast section and now am happy to report that it is back to normal. No more freezes or crashes, it just works.

So thanks for the report, Sam. And thanks to Linc for the detailed instructions for trouble shooting.

derico

Level 1

0 points

Jan 22, 2015 12:51 PM in response to derico

Hrm, I may have spoken too soon.

After iTunes played about 10 episodes without an issue it started freezing again although the music kept playing. By now I am back at the start: As soon as I switch to the podcast section, iTunes freezes completely or crashes immediately.

I will compare my crash reports and logs with yours and give feedback then…

Sam from CA Author

Level 1

9 points

Jan 22, 2015 8:12 PM in response to derico

Thanks for sharing your experience, derico. I've been working on what Linc recommended, moving the library aside and re-importing the media to a fresh library piece-by-piece. I've tried twice, it's time-consuming, and I'm not having much luck.

I started with podcasts, importing a few at a time by dragging and dropping the folders containing the downloaded episodes onto iTunes. I then clicked the Subscribe button for each one to update the podcast feeds. I went alphabetically. This went fine until I got to the letter M. One title starting with M wouldn't let me subscribe; it imported the old downloaded episodes and had the correct feed url, but when I clicked the Subscribe button, nothing happened. Then one starting with O, another with P, and pretty much all of my podcasts starting with R or S wouldn't subscribe. These are current podcasts (Serial, Radiolab, Spilled Milk), and I double-checked the feed urls, and even went to the iTunes store to subscribe that way. As I was adding these podcasts, iTunes gradually got slower and slower to respond, until it was taking 15 seconds to respond to any request (download an episode, mark as read, delete an episode, switch between My Podcasts and My Stations).

I decided to start over again. I again moved the current library files aside and started with a blank library. This time, I only imported one podcast at a time and tested. I also left out any that I thought would cause a problem, like older podcasts whose feeds don't exist anymore. It's not really clear when the problem starts up again, because it happens so gradually. At first, each action happens instantaneously. After a while, it takes a fraction of a second to respond. Then a full second, then 3 seconds. Then 5, 10, or 15 seconds. At least this time around, I can actually subscribe to all of them, but since iTunes likes to lose track of which old episodes I've listened to, I need to be able to move through quickly to mark things read or unread, select new episodes to download, and delete the ones I'm finished with. This is impractical when it takes 15 seconds to complete a single action. And I've barely even started on importing the music or audiobooks.

I guess my next step is to try this one more time, disconnecting from the iTunes store and keeping podcast syncing disabled. If it doesn't work, I'm wondering if there's something in my user account or preferences outside of iTunes that's corrupted. Maybe I'll delete my user account, start with a fresh account, recreate my preferences from scratch, and manually import my other data. Any thoughts on that? I do have a clone to work from.

derico

Level 1

0 points

Feb 17, 2015 10:05 AM in response to Sam from CA

Hey Sam,

sorry for the late response. I tried a few other things and now it seems to work reliably - finally!

I was not going to rebuild my library just to get podcasts to work, song ratings are more important to me than new episodes 😉

So I suggest you try something similar before starting from scratch. Good Luck!

Here is what I did a few days ago:

Deactivated syncing for podcasts and playback info on my Mac and quit iTunes. If it had crashed on start I would have just trashed the preference file.
Switched kind of media from podcast to music/video for downloaded episodes I wanted to keep. This makes them disappear from Podcasts and show up in Music or Video. As I mostly listen to music podcasts that is what I do to keep good episodes anyway...
Deleted all podcasts from iTunes - basically cleaning out remaining episodes and unsubscribing from all of them. Quit iTunes to update library file accordingly.
On my iPhone I updated podcasts and listened to a few of them to verify subscriptions are still in tact and make iCloud aware of current state.
Launched iTunes on the Mac and made sure sections other than podcasts are working fine - which they did.
Switched to the podcast section which was empty, of course. Reactivated syncing for podcasts and playback info while keeping fingers crossed.
All subscriptions came back correctly, even which episodes I've listened to already.

No more freezes or crashes until now. I am quite optimistic that the issue is gone.

Cheers, Ricco

Specifics of my setup/situation:

I stream all episodes, no automatic downloads. Most of them would get deleted after listening anyways.
Before this solution iTunes seemed to try getting all episodes of all podcasts I subscribed to. It displayed several hundred new episodes for multiple stations just before freezing...

iTunes 12 stops responding and crashes almost constantly