iTunes crashes while sync'ing....

the program crashes without adding any of the new files to my iPod.

are you getting an error message? if so, what does it say?

Hey guys,

i've had a similar problem since i started using itunes 7,i cant synch my music..an unknown error (-50) has occured..is the most common one although i have had various other error numbers,

Please help!

I had the spinning ball after upgrade to 7.02 - couldn't get the update to work without freezing. I unplugged ethernet cable, restarted iTunes and it works. As soon as podcasts start to download I get the freeze again. So maybe the problems are related to downloads?

sorry posted this in wrong discussion - ignore me!

I have restarted and tried again several times, but in the middle of synching my iPod, the program just crashes without any error message.

hmmmm. better start checking on some other background information.

does it always seem to be doing that when the same track is being transferred?

are you downloading any podcasts to the ipod?

does the ipod do the same sort of thing if you're manually transferring content rather than automatically syncing?

hmmm. okay, let's try enabling manual management:

Managing content manually on iPod

if you can't get to those options prior to the freeze hitting you, let's try seeing if we can do it by creating a new user account on the PC and connecting to that.

head into your user accounts control panel and create a new user account with full administrative rights. (there's help documentation on how to do that at the left of the control panel screen.) while you're in that control panel, switch off "fast user switching" in your logging-on preferences.

now log out of the old account and log into the new account.

plug the ipod in. do not associate it with the blank library in the new user account.

do you get the freeze? if not, can you switch to manual management?

if you can get her to manually manage, disconnect, close itunes, log back into the old account, and try another connection to itunes in there. do you still get the freeze there?

🙂 glad to hear you've made some incremental progress ... but it's still a bit disconcerting that you can't get automatic sync to work, though.

keep us posted on any developments.

You know, b noir,

Now is probably as good a time as any to collect a few crash logs from these cases where iTunes is crashing during iPod sync and send them to the Apple engineers. Unless it's just a hallucination caused by having 20 pounds of uncooked turkey staring back at me from the refrigeration, there seems to be a small spike in these cases. The instructions that I give people on to collect and send in crash logs are attached below.

I've been having them also say that Toonz asked for this information as a way of getting the message noticed.

--

Typically, you'll need to configure Dr. Watson on your PC in order to generate crash logs. Windows start menu -> Run. Type in "cmd". Hit return. At the prompt in the command line window that comes up, type in

drwtsn32 -i

And hit return.

This will create crash logs in Documents And Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Dr Watson\. There'll usually be a file in here called "drwtsn32.log" If there's already a file there, it most likely has multiple crash logs in it (new crash logs are just appended to the end of the file). So, delete this file. This will make sure you're not sending extra information I don't need. These crash logs are text files, so you can open them in notepad or whatever to see what information you're sending.

So, get the machine setup to collect crash logs, do the thing that makes iTunes crash. You need to send that file to our buddy Roy. Make sure that you include:

(1) the drwtsn32.log file.
(2) the link to this thread.
(3) a one line description of your problem, i.e. "iTunes crashes while automatically synching iPod".
(4) the username that you're using here in the discussion boards.

Roy is getting a little swamped with messages and needs to make sure he gets all the information. And if he doesn't get that information, the message is just going to get dropped on the floor.

Now is probably as good a time as any to collect a few crash logs from these cases where iTunes is crashing during iPod sync and send them to the Apple engineers. Unless it's just a hallucination caused by having 20 pounds of uncooked turkey staring back at me from the refrigeration, there seems to be a small spike in these cases.

hi toonz! i think you might be right. i have been wondering if the spike was due to the 7.0.x versions not liking mplugin (or other plugins), but i haven't gotten a lot of feedback indicating that that might be what has been going on.

i had pulled back from sending crash logs and whatnot through to Roy, since he's been so swamped lately. but if there's an investigation afoot on this topic, i'll start sending stuff through.

... while we're on the topic of spikes, there seems a spike in reports of -50 errors in conjunction with "disk could not be read or written to" errors. (on ipod models other than 2nd gen shuffles.)

here's a link through to an example (although it's a bit atypical in that it's hitting the chap on a preferences change rather than a sync.)

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3571045#3571045

This happens on Macs as well as Windows. This has to be a problem with iTunes 7.

Prblems that I have encountered when connecting to a 2nd gen iPod Shuffle:

1. -50 error in log
2. Corruption of files on the iPod
3. iTunes hangs and will not allow the iPod to be ejected.
4. Following erasure of the iPod and reinstalling Itunes (twice)... songs updated but were extremely slow. Next update then causes one of the problems listed above.

Apple needs to get their engineers on this one as it is clear from several different threads that this problem is not isolated.

iMac Intel Mac OS X (10.4.4)