iTunes 12.7 keeps crashing upon open

I know this was last updated a few months ago, but it was a top result for my search, so maybe my findings are helpful to others.

I was experiencing this same issue, and by chance I happened to look at Notification Centre and discover that there's a new widget available, Now Playing, which is functionally identical to the iTunes widget I've been using before.

What I did was, with Notification Centre open, I chose edit, removed the iTunes widget and put the Now Playing widget in its place, now iTunes seems to be stable again. In addition to crashing I also had another issue, which was that my media keys weren't working properly for iTunes, swapping widgets resolved that as well.

In my case I updated from El Capitan to High Sierra (yes, yes, I'm a bit slow to update I know) so I assume the iTunes widget is obsolete now, and somehow has compatibility issues under High Sierra. Why it isn't uninstalled automatically in that case I have no idea, but it's working now so that's what matters.

Or… not. I seem to have jumped the gun there; swapping out the widgets just seem to coincide with a long period of stability, it went right back to crashing again. Also the Now Playing widget doesn't just control iTunes, and is in fact annoying to use since which media it decides is now playing is not consistent (for me it keeps switching to movies that are open in Safari but not playing, even though I've played something else more recently).

but how do i do to maintain all my music? cuz if i do it its a clean start right?