iTunes: Still Crappy After All These Years

The below with apologies to Paul Simon…

Installed the new iTunes on my Mac last night

It took so long to do it I just cried

And I re-synced all my podcasts

All those Audible enhanced downloads

Still crappy after all these years

Last week Apple released iTunes version 9.0.2. I tried again to upgrade from version 7 and again it crashed. This time I persevered a little more and I’ve got it mostly working. Here’s how I did it.

When an upgraded version of iTunes is first started, it upgrades the library too. It was during this library upgrade that iTunes was crashing for me. iTunes helpfully prints the name of the album it is crashing on and I could remove those albums - which involved the tortuous process of down-grading, removing the offending album and up-grading again - and it would continue for a bit until its next crash. This is what caused me to give up before. This time, however, starting with a clean empty library, I tried just importing one of those crash inducing albums. And it worked! I had also run all of my albums through mp3val (the MP3 file validator) and fixed any errors. So this lead me to believe that actually there was nothing wrong with the albums. Perhaps the problem was in the iTunes library file itself.

So, I deleted 200 giga-bytes of data and re-imported all my CDs again. Well, not quite. But I did want to start from a clean slate which meant moving aside the current library and re-importing the files from disk. I had to juggle multiple hard disks to do this due to disk space limitations. So I copied my entire iTunes library to another disk (which took three hours) and set about the re-import. Podcasts are an issue here since they have meta-data associated with them like source URL, text and dates which are not present in the MP3 files. So I moved the Podcasts directory out of the library before I started the re-import. This also had a side effect of flushing all those never-gonna-listen-to podcasts out of the library and gave me the a chance to replace them with all new never-gonna-listen-to subscriptions.

OK. So I have the library sans-Podcasts. I started the re-import and… it crashed. Of course, it crashed! What else should I have expected? But this time it crashed on audio books. Specifically it was crashing on importing Audible .aa files. All of them. I tried the old Audible de-authorise and re-authorise shuffle but that made no difference. Still crashing. Then I tried downloading a file again from Audible and that worked. I could import newly downloaded Audible files but not the ones that were already on my hard disk. Oh joy! Now I have to download all my audiobooks again. At least Audible lets me re-download. And Audible has a new high bitrate version called extended .aax files which I would probably want anyway. So, I removed all the audiobooks from the original library and re-imported. It worked! All the music is now in iTunes 9. Then I set about re-subscribing to the Podcasts I actually listen to and some new ones I probably will not and downloading all the old Audible books again.

The moral of this story? Popularity and quality are inversely proportional. Thank you Apple.