Comments on: iTunes database issues

By: Lindee

Lindee — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:12:29 +0000

My problem is this: I decided to move my entire library (about 400GB) onto an external hard drive. Easy enough. But then, many of the songs and videos that I had bought from iTunes over a year ago no longer work. I am told I have to authorize my computer, which I have done many times. The songs and videos show up, but I can’t move them onto my iTouch or iPhone. I called Apple about this and they said I had to pay them to fix the issue. Don’t I pay enough? I had to hear their rather crappy customer service reps pawn me off from one person to another for several hours before the supervisor said I had to pay more money before they would consider any ideas about how to fix this problem.
I looked for a series I had downloaded recently, and can’t find it anywhere. Yes, my computer is authorized. Yes, the external hard drive was plugged in before I started the computer. And, I am not a moronic idiot when it comes to computers, as I am sure would make apple technical support very happy, so they can just say it was my stupidity that made my library a mess. I just want to be able to move those things that I did buy on iTunes on my iTouch and iPhone. Needless to say, I no longer buy anything from iTunes.
Any suggestions on how to get those iTunes purchases, especially the videos, to transfer?

By: Mk

Mk — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:30:18 +0000

For some reason, ITUNES isn’t locating the song titles from its database. When I want to import a song from a CD, for example, I have to import each track individually, so I can add the correct track name off of the CD. It worked originally, when I first downloaded Itunes.

I’m running Vista Business Edition.

Any suggestions?

By: Angela Randall

Angela Randall — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:32:41 +0000

Yeah, iTunes is kind of backwards. But you get used to it. Basically, my
extreme playlisting is to combat all the stupid iTunes quirks. If
iTunes would let me tag my songs with multiple genres, country
tags/fields, use personal tags like moods, choose my next song
according to how much I like and when I last listened to it etc etc
I’d have no need for all my playlists. Also, when you have an iPod
with less storage than your music collection the only option you have
is to choose which playlists you want on the iPod. So, what if I want
a few albums, too? I’ve had to create playlists of all the albums I
usually want on my iPod. Very, very dumb.

It’s definitely the interaction between playlists that slows iTunes
down, not the amount of tracks or the amount if playlists. When I make
changes to a simple playlist that isn’t referenced by another playlist
the change is instant and there’s no waiting before I can do something
else. If I change anything that’s referenced by another playlist I
have to wait around 5 minutes for it to decide what all the playlists
should have in them now. Some of my playlists reference other
playlists and other playlists up to about 15 layers deep. That’s why
it runs like a dog.

I’ve already suggested to iTunes how it might be fixed: If they’d
implement a global “update all smart playlists automatically” check
box that I could turn on and off for ALL of the playlists at once then
I could turn it off while mucking around with playlists and turn it
back on again when I want it to do its thing. I know they have this
checkbox for each individual list, but that doesn’t really help. When
I change a given playlist there are usually at least 100 playlists
that update after the change.

By: Steve Burgess

Steve Burgess — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:57:15 +0000

I recently bought the movie nacho libre for my ipod and it never downloaded and i would like a refund on my purchase

By: Jose Manuel Araque

Jose Manuel Araque — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:06:35 +0000

I had issues like that, it turned out to be related to using a VBR encoder (use fixed rates instead?). But this is not the topic of this thread.

By: Raymond

Raymond — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:01:16 +0000

Apple’s support forums would be the place for you to ask.

By: W R D

W R D — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:42:50 +0000

Could someone figure this out for me….I only have 500 songs, but everysong has this popping like issue happening, you know, like their was dust on the record player needle. When I purchased the PC itunes was already installed, but I did one of the updates and everysong went for crap. Some of the songs I cannot get again and every song was done from a new cd. Can anyone tell me what happened???

By: DvdMovies

DvdMovies — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:31:17 +0000

All I had to do was uninstall and reinstall Quick Time Player. I use Windows and not too computer savy - maybe this could help someonelse that is also computer illiterate.
lucky You, I can’t do that…

By: S McGee

S McGee — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:08:25 +0000

I am so disappointed with my latest version of iTunes because the quality in which it plays the movies is so poor that it is no longer worth it to purchase downloads and new DVD’s. In fact Apple has gone from a company I have great respect for to one that is just like all the rest. What disappointment. My “entertainment” center has turned into another job that I have to keep on updating and fixing.

By: Pilya

Pilya — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:20:00 +0000

To Randy W: I have to ask, what would you replace iTunes/iPod with? The fact of the matter is that there are no library systems for the Windows/Mac world designed to handle large libraries. My library is only 40,000 songs so I do not have the 70k experience. I can tell you that 40k in iTunes is a much better experience then 40k in winamp or wmp.

The big move (if and when) will be in Leopard when they can move the “database” into a real database ala Core Data. (note: iTunes is not in a database at all right now… its strictly a xml file… huge difference).

(if and when) Core Data is used, I am 1000% confident that all of our performance woes will be dramatically changed. But then again… you are using windows… so in keeping full windows computability there is a monstrous problem in that the cocoa framework does not live in windows at all. So as they did with safari, they will need to port more cocoa framework goodness… not an easy task.

In the meantime if you do find a system that is as joyous as the iPod world… please let us know. I dont know of a single entity that provides an equal or greater Ux then what you currently have.

By: Randy W.

Randy W. — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:19:33 +0000

Well, now I think Apple may have screwed themselves. They have not come out with a 160GB iPod and the only software that supports it cannot successfully handle that much music. I am just venting here, but, what are they thinking?
I have just over 70,000 songs in my library and after burning all of my thousands of CDs (I am little older), I store my music on a server connected to this computer (both Windows variety) by a gigabit connection. My iTunes library sits at 50% utilization of the CPU (dual processor, so it is actually 100% of one core – which is all it can utilize) any time I do anything from trying to add a song, change songs or even scroll the list of songs.
Now that Apple has come out with a 160GB iPod, how do they expect to handle the complaints of people who have these problems? I have moved my iTunes library from Windows 2000 to XP to Vista to my Mac and none of them can handle the bogging down of iTunes worthless database system. I suppose there is always hope for 8.0 because 7.4 lasted for just under a week and this morning upgrading to 7.4.1 I hoped for some satisfaction, but I was no less disappointed than going from 4 to 5, 5 to 6 or 6 to 7.
I have 4 iPods and at this rate I am so frustrated that I think I may be ready to go with another mp3 player and just give up on Apple/Mac like I did back in the early 90’s.

By: Raymond

Raymond — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:56:00 +0000

I have close to 120k songs and iTunes is really getting slow here. Please Apple, do something with how you handle the database!

By: nodata

nodata — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:36:58 +0000

maybe i have a fix ihad the same problems 35k songs on 400gig extdrive playback stoping every 10 to 35 secs banging my head inbetween so looks like you need to store only the song files on the extdrive keep itunes and xml files on the internal drive playing tracks and writing xmls at same time seems to much for firewire its working for me ta to all yo who posted xml was the key good key hint thank you thank you

By: SoCalSwami

SoCalSwami — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:30:29 +0000

I AM NOT ALONE!
~
For the longest time I have suffered in silence, searching the web for a magical cure-all that would end my agony. While this thread won’t resolve my pain, at least I know there are others (and rather articulate ones at that) who suffer they same fate as I.
~
What the hell was Apple thinking when they designed the “itl”? What an awful excuse for a database.
~
I tend to use iTunes as the transpoter to my iPod and listen on my iPod. For this I need an up-to-date library.
~
Since I prefer iTunes not manage my music, any music I add manually to my library folder system directly is not updated in iTunes.
~
The idea that iTunes does not have an automated library update features is jaw-dropping. Winamp does.
~
To get around this problem I used two solutions.
~
My first solution (up to about 10,000 songs) was to delete the itl and xml files and re-import the entire library. The would take roughly 2-6 hours import time with the gapless playback and volume leveling adding a huge chunk of process time.
~
Then I found itlu (google: iTunes Library Updater) and life was good again. But, support seems to have stopped while the author is focused on school. And recent attempts to use itlu have not removed broken links and left out hundreds of new songs.
~
Now at 42,000 songs I am simply screwed.
~
It seems Apple is not only opposed to writing the code to update your library themselves, they clearly do not want anyone else writing such a tool.
~
aND plEZ, enough talk about your iPod woes, your missing the point of the thread.
~
And don’t get me started on the thought I have too much music. OMFG!

By: NOISESHAPES

NOISESHAPES — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:27:14 +0000

I have a problem that I believe is also related with itunes database and that is that Itunes doesn’t see all the music from ipod. Other ipod file managers do see everything and also I don’t have a problem playing it from the ipod. This happened after I installed winamp ipod plugin ml_ipod or something like that which is known to conflict with itunes. I did re-install itunes (after uninstalling and cleaning refferences in registries in windows) and I did uninstall winamp and its plugin but still no change in itunes. Does someone know how I can solve this?
thank you

By: Bob Smith

Bob Smith — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 14:50:28 +0000

Re: #8 Jason…what a typically arrogant developer response - tell the user it’s his fault for having too large a music collection. You twit.

“Maybe you simply have too much music.” Who are YOU to say anyone else has “too much music”? My own CD collection when converted at 128k was over 60 gig. Twit.

“I think your complaints are unwarranted.” Typical developer response. The product has some architectural issues that’s causing a user problems, and you want to poo-poo the issues.

“I don’t know anyone who has that much music.” Yea, well, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t own a car. Does that mean EVERYONE should own a car? Twit.

“Maybe if you think it’s necessary to have that much music on your computer, you should consider Audion.” Yea, don’t look to the manufacturere for a solution to their mistakes-go find someone else to fix Apples’ flaws.

“iTunes wasn’t intended to handle that much data.” A direct contradiction to “I think your complaints are unwarranted”. This is exactly the point he was making- iTunes development did not address large music collections, although this occurs with 60 G collections for the 60 G iPod.

“They never thought that anyone would be sticking that many songs into the app.” Yea, right. That’s why this problem occurs with 60G file collections for the 60G iPod. They knew people would be doing this, just not the majority of users, so they were willing to accept this problem for the small group who would have problems.

You’re a typical developer twit…shutup and go home.

By: Miguel C.

Miguel C. — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:27:47 +0000

I think the problem is CPU overhead because real time update of Smart PLaylists. If you disable real time update in all of them it solves a lot.

Miguel.

By: James

James — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 06:24:24 +0000

Jonas,
Thanks for the explanation. I will look at the link. Still not sure about why everyone is talking about this XML stuff. But thank you for taking the time to respond to my post.

By: Jonas Hellesøe Nielsen

Jonas Hellesøe Nielsen — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 18:34:26 +0000

-> James:
An XML file is an universal way to store information, like databases and so on.
As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML says:

“Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different information systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet.”

See there for more.

Lucky me, i only have 7,5K songs

By: Ideasculptor

Ideasculptor — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 23:37:31 +0000

This problem has been driving me nuts, too, since I exclusively use various laptops with fairly slow drives. My music library lives on an external 2.5″ disk and it has gotten to the point where I cannot use iTunes at all because I can’t get any work done. I was already having issues with iTunes because it just lacks features that people with huge libraries seem to want to use. I don’t know about you folks, but I seem to listen to my 20,000 track library in a different manner than those folks with a thousand or two tracks. I’m not going to detail my gripes here, since I have been slowly but surely working on an application that provides a nice user interface that works well on very large music libraries. I’ll post a note here if I ever get the thing into a state worthy of publishing the source. But it definitely uses SQL to maintain the backend and should be able to, fairly simply, move from SQLlite to mysql to postgres and others. I’ve tested against those 3 with no difficulties. And yes, performance when updating a single field is far superior to writing out a couple hundred megs to the disk!!!

By: James

James — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 01:42:59 +0000

Hi,
Can anyone tell me what an XML file is? Where is it located? If I’m understanding this,it is best to turn off the write privileges to this file Yes? Thanks

By: rob

rob — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 23:08:48 +0000

My iTunes won’t let me even launch the program if the library is read only.. it’s really frustrating!

By: Nii

Nii — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 21:31:12 +0000

i work with about 60,000 songs, my solution (for macs) was to create multiple user accounts, (in this case 4) and enable fast user switching which virtually allowed to have 4 differnt itunes opened, thus 4 smaller databases instead of the combined 160mb (database and xml file) i had under one itune program running. hope this helps, helped me a great deal

By: Alpha

Alpha — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 06:13:43 +0000

Thanks for the well presented information, I tried to find the reason of my problems for more than two months without success until I discovered your blog. I have about 9000 songs in my iTunes library and all the painful issues that come with them.

I really hope Apple will fix the way the player handles the data, until then the proposed solution with locking the XML will certainly ease my troubles!

By: Victor

Victor — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 10:41:55 +0000

I just want to say a BIG thanks to everyone who suggested locking the XML library file to stop iTunes from locking up the OS at the beginning/end of every track.

I’ve just spent a sunday afternoon uninstalling and reinstalling iTunes, re-building library files, updating chipset drivers, updating the BIOS, testing with and without anti-virus … even considering a full format … all in an effort to have iTunes play music _without_ freezing up. Who would’ve thought the solution would be as easy as setting an attribute on a single file!

Thank god for Google and you guys

By: Evan

Evan — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 22:05:17 +0000

So is there a music player that can deal with large collections?

By: Billie

Billie — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:54:52 +0000

My sister downloaded the new iTunes for me without me knowing and personaly i think the older one is better. is there any way of gettin the older one back?

By: ALL2RAIN

ALL2RAIN — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 14:29:26 +0000

Have a client who asked me this. Trying to help.
I have about 2,000 songs in my iTunes and have loaded them onto my iPod. They are eating up a lot of my small hard drive (only 30 gig) on my laptop. I want to remove titles off of iTune and add more and not have it take the removed ones off the iPod when I sync them the next time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

By: Pilya

Pilya — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 08:18:12 +0000

Martin,

Although I have not had the chance to read everyone’s response. I can echo your complaints and concerns to the tee. I have a 750gb collection of 47,000 songs that i have ripped from my CDs, a big portion of which have been done in ALAC.

My MacBook which is at the base factory specs (ie. 512mb RAM) is unable to run iTunes when I have a full library. iTunes freezes at startup… and is frozen indefinitely. While this issue is not reproducible on my PowerBook (also with 512mb), there is a considerable slow down with the large libraries. (my data/xml files are 50mb in size each). This problem however is not exclusive to any one piece of software or platform. Working in the windows world actually gets even worst. Text files (ie. XML files) are NOT appropriate above certain sizes… my experience is that they should be kept below 10mb. EVERY developer should understand that parsing through a text file is NOT efficient and should be avoided at all costs. This is just basic and simple developer knowledge.

For all those people who truly want to understand how horrible the situation is; simply take a 50mb text file and open it up in any text reader or editor. There are very few editors out there who can handle just the opening of such files let alone the manipulation of them.

Keep in mind that when iTunes was first introduced… and up until the release of tiger, Core Data was not around. Now that it is in the OS I can only imagine (and hope) that Apple will begin to use it for the iTunes library. This will also make life MUCH easier for developers who wish to create applications that work with iTunes.

I have to add as well that I was a “Metadata Guru” during my tenure at MS. The “Metadata Gurus” were an exclusive group of experts who helped advise the WMP team on handling media in regards to library specific roles and metadata tagging of media. MS made every attempt to bring WMP into a SQL database as a result of the very problems that you have mentioned. As I am sure you and any other Power-user knows, no player can properly handle large collections… not the kind of collections that we have.

I would also like to add how imperative it is that the media creation industry and various software alliances need to ditch the ID3 tagging system. One way to allow all software to improve upon the way it deals with data is to implement metadata that is agnostic to type and classification. The perfect example is to look at the differences between the metadata that the classical genre has in comparison to rock & pop. iTunes/Apple should really step up to the plate and provide an open standard that goes beyond the garage-controlled realm of ID3 and gives developers a chance to really spread their wings in regards to how a user interacts with their media libraries. In the near future this will also be important as the video, TV, and film distribution system enters the digital age. Shoe-horning an ID3 based tagging system into a TV show video clip will not suffice.

To summarize, the problems that you see in iTunes are not exclusive to iTunes. They are through-out all software of this classification. Though it is IMHO that Apple needs to take it upon themselves as the industry leader to solve the base issues that are ever so abundant. Just moving the data into a Coredata will not solve all issues though is a good first step.

-Michael

By: Haley

Haley — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 00:10:28 +0000

I am having a problem! I have two movies, the kingdom hearts 2 intro and the kingdom hearts final mix(if anyone knows what they are) videos on iTunes. One is about five minutes and the other is about 3 minutes and one is 30.0 MB and the other is 35.3 MB. When I try to download them to my ipod, it says that they wont work for my type of ipod. I have a fifth generation ipod and they are in MPEG-4 Movie format and I have over 26 GB left in space. I still am not seeing the problem and how to fix it. I spent HOURS trying to find out what was wrong! I would be HIGHLY grateful for any solution to my problem!

By: Peter Deslandes

Peter Deslandes — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:00:37 +0000

I worked on a polish mobile project once that suffered from problems with diacritics. I agree that you would expect iTunes to cope but the mobile networks in Poland can’t always handle them so it’s not entirely surprising. I know that I have an ø in my database, and possibly more characters like it, but that’s not entirely conclusive so we are probably looking in the right area…

I’m afraid I have never played with the export feature so you are going to have to play around with that yourself. On XP you can set up different iTunes libraries on different user accounts (although they cannot all be logged in at the same time) so if you can do something like that on your Mac you could perhaps experiment a little without messing up your current libraries?

Hope this helps

By: quaeler

quaeler — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 11:39:11 +0000

ya - i’ve got some mp3s that have double byte nonsense going on in the id3 tags, as well as id3 tags and filenames with latin characters with diacritics..

still i’d have thought that such scenarios are obvious use case stuff for iTunes.. i was dreading the hunting and pecking of re-adding all the files to detect the suspicious one (and losing metadata in the process as well). do you know this: if i have a library of X files, and in iTunes, i select Y of them & deselct them (so they no longer have their checkboxes ticked), if i then File->Export Library… does it only export the (X-Y) files, or all X files? (it would make the detective work a lot nicer were it the former and not the latter)

thanks for the feedback

By: Peter Deslandes

Peter Deslandes — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 10:37:38 +0000

That’s a strange one, but I wonder if you have the same catalogue of music in each case. Maybe there is something about one or more files, e.g. the tags or the content of the tags such as odd characters or some sort of corruption, that is making the XML file screw up. Certainly to have two separate instances of iTunes running on separate machines suggests that something like that is upsetting it.

If they are the same libraries, clear one out to check that the basic installation is not at fault and then add the music to the library in chunks until you see it go wrong.

As it happens, I have recently bought a SqueezeBox which is a media streaming device (which is amazing, by the way!). It relies on the XML file to synchronise itself with my library in iTunes and it has to rescan if I make changes in iTunes (adding new music or whatever). To allow this I now have to unlock the XML file, let iTunes update it, and then lock it again. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?!!

Let us know how you get on - you might find something interesting.

best of luck

By: quaeler

quaeler — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 10:06:33 +0000

i wish i had this problem - i have two separate iTunes installations (6.0.5) each under osX (10.4.7), neither of which will write xml files nor will either File->Export Library… correctly (i specify a save file, it begins to write a file, and then removes that file (presumably, iTunes is erring and in catching the error is removing the output file it started as part of a cleanup)).

has anyone seen a similar problem, or solutions to such?

thanks
loki

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:15:29 +0000

I found this site after googling a problem I have. I am storing my iTunes music on a PC downstairs, connected via Ethernet to my Airport Extreme Base Station. I then use my MacBook Pro and its front row remote to play music on a small upstairs stereo with an Airport Express Base Station.

I use this method because my MacBook Pro will not store my entire music collection once it is all imported. Currently, I have my music on a separate hard drive in the PC (not an external.) I have about 7800 songs, taking up around 47GB of space. My current problem is that whenever I try to burn a playlist to CD, the iTunes display says “Checking Playlist”, the progress bar completes, and then iTunes locks up tighter than a drum.

I then logged off and tried this with my wife’s account on the PC. Her iTunes music library is in C:\Documents & Settings\%USERNAME%\My Documents\My Music\iTunes (the default location) . I can burn playlists just fine from there.

Then, I created a new account on the PC and dragged my entire music collection from the 2nd drive into iTunes and set up the drive (M:) as my iTunes music library location. That worked fine.

Can any one determine what this might be? I saw a post online recommending that problems like this can be solved by looking for “corrupt” music. How can I do this? Even if I create a one song playlist, iTunes still freezes when checking the Playlist.

Thanks for any input!

Jim