On getting by with multiple bugs in iTunes 12.3.1 update (some problems and fixes compiled)

On an “old” iMac (early 2008), the latest iTunes 12.3.1.23 has caused me the same troubles as many others here and in other forums, but I notice that people keep opening new threads about issues already described. That’s understandable when you’re alarmed, but it makes it harder to keep track and I’m not one of the helpful community “wizards”.

I'm simply starting over myself in a bid to put some key problems in one place, with a walk-through of how I've tackled them.

While the real solution can only come from Apple in a fresh update that undoes the damage and gets iTunes back up to speed, I've largely managed to make iTunes function through reading and trial and error with OS X 10.11.1 El Capitan and just 4 GB of memory:

— if you can open it, iTunes starts out by being incredibly slow (many report that the beach ball of death” spins for a very long time, wherever you've just clicked on the app), but it somehow speeds up over days. I came to realise that it was working even when the Mac told me “application not responding”. and let it go on.

— since the updated iTunes update was so sluggish after installation, I force quit and went back two days in my Time Machine back-up to restore all the items inside the iTunes folder in the Music folder (apart from the iTunes Music folder containing my songs and movies). I did this to avoid possible corruption in the library files.

The Mac would not let me go “backwards” and reinstall the previous version of iTunes. Instructions on how to uninstall the latest version via the Terminal failed to work for me because iTunes is an integral part of the OS, I’m no expert with the Terminal and I didn’t want to bring “forward” the last version into my Applications folder and have two iTunes, for fear of even worse problems down the line.

— but iTunes turned into a ruthless memory hog, initially allowing me to use just one other programme at a time while I let it run in the background, doing whatever it wanted. Here, the widely used free app Memory Clean available from the App Store has come in very handy, enabling me to keep the Mac functioning.

— iTunes works far better if you use it in “safe mode” (by pressing on the Alt and Cmd keys when you open it). I found an improvement despite the fact that I have no third-party extensions installed, which won’t work in safe mode. iTunes will offer to restore your music library in safe mode and I let it do so, which took less than 15 minutes with 22,600 songs.

— on trying to sync with an iPhone 5S, I swiftly found that iTunes will no longer sync iPhone apps updated on the Mac to the iPhone. Apple seems never to have warned us of this annoying change and I’ve read speculation as to why it may be, but nothing firm.

— iTunes will still sync playlists, both on a recent iPhone and old iPods. However, when I first tried, it asked me to free up 200 MB on the phone while showing plenty of space, then crashed. On my second attempt, iTunes hung for 20 minutes while attempting to transfer purchases from the iPhone to the Mac (there weren’t any), then again told me that there was not enough space for songs.

A longstanding discrepancy between the amount of space allocated to the iPhone in the usage bar on iTunes and the real(?) amount shown in iPhone Settings under the About heading has become bigger than ever — a matter of gigabytes rather than megabytes. Even before the update, I had to remove music in order to sync Apps, then put the songs back.

— iTunes syncs more music than I want it to. I’ve long kept iCloud switched off and will never use iTunes Match after reading horror stories of the damage done to a few people’s music libraries. Despite such precautions, I’m finding that iTunes will not sync some of the playlists I want because it has synced a handful of other albums under an unwanted “Purchased” playlist in Music.

I can identify which albums they are in Settings under General/About/Storage & iCloud Usage, where I delete them, gain space, and hope they don’t transfer anew during the next sync. This works some of the time.

— iTunes 12.3.1 will still download items from the iTunes Store, import CDs and what have you, but as it does so, there is a long lag between what the app is doing and what it tells you it’s doing in the pane at the top (e.g. with successive tracks), if it tells you anything at all. You have to take it on faith until the task is done!

— iTunes music playback no longer skips (but still displays an information lag) once you abolish Genius. I remembered an old note and looked to find that my iTunes Library Genius.itdb database file in the iTunes folder was a whopping 365 MB (compared with 11.8 MB for the critical iTunes Library.itl and 44.4 MB for a recreated iTunes Music Library.xml.)

I switched Genius off in the Store menu and about half an hour later, the Genius database had been cleansed down to 123 KB and I plan to keep it that way, never used any more than I ever bothered with it before.

Because I need the music enough, iTunes has gradually settled down in safe mode to allow me to do more with my Mac while I use it, but it needed a lot of time. I can only speculate why and eagerly wait for Apple to sort out all the bugs, which will be no mean feat with a cluttered application, always reaching out to the Internet.

Since iTunes first came out, a relatively lean music player and attractive store, Apple has asked ever more of a single flagship application, but that’s no excuse for releasing such a shoddy update with the nonsensical claim that it improves “overall stability and performance”.

Believe it or not, there have been even worse and more damaging updates in the history of iTunes, but that will be no consolation to people struggling with this one.

Thanks for your patience and I hope that somewhere, you’ve found suggestions that may help you out until Apple’s geeks do what they’re paid to do. And do search this forum, along with other Mac forums you’ll find. There are many people who’ve kept up with Mac technology better than me and who are still very generous with their expertise.