End Transmission

Well, ok. Not really. Yesterday’s update to iTunes 9.2 and iPhone OS4 seems to have caused a bit of a stir with loads of people, including me, falling foul of a tricksy gremlin in the systems that cause iTunes to crash.

So what happens?

iTunes itself seems to work fine after the upgrade, as does the phone. Trying to sync the phone after the update on the other hand can cause things to go a bit pear shaped (why pears? Why not pine cones? They are far more irregular and spiky).

iTunes starts the sync process, getting as far as validating that any purchases on your ipod/iphone are valid and then locks up. After a couple of minutes iTunes closes itself and tries to report the crash.

What can I do about it?

I took a copy of the itunes folder and spent a while deleting/recreating each of the four main config/preference files that itunes uses to see which one(s) were causing the problems. Like most people, I really didn’t want it to be the main library xml file as all 180 Gig my music lives on a remote server and I really didn’t want to have to rebuild that. No-sir-ee.

After a bit of poking around it quickly became apparent that my copy of the Itunes Library file (not the XML one) seems to have become damaged in some way. Normally after an update iTunes runs a library update. I don’t remember seeing it run it with this recent upgrade, so I can only guess that it either didn’t bother, or it failed at some point.

Thankfully, when you run the upgrade, itunes creates a backup of the library file before doing anything. Delete/rename the copy in your itunes folder and copy the most recent backup from the backup folder into the main itunes one and remove the date from the name. Restarting itunes with this old file should kick start the library upgrade and fix the ipod sync problem.

Job done, annoyance over!