Widespread iTunes Lock-up Problem?

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
After doing some research when my copy of iTunes started completely locking up my PBG4, I found that the problem is widespread (see Apple Discussion Board).



The song stutters for 5-10 seconds, then stops completely. From that point on, the mouse can move, but nothing can be selected (any open app). A hard restart is then necessary.



Unfortunately, the latest version of iTunes doesn't address the problem.



Anyone else having problems? FYI, I've got about 50GB of songs on an external FW Drive. The drive works fine otherwise.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 15
    wow... thats... really informative. thanks!
  • Reply 2 of 15
    wilcowilco Posts: 985member
    wow...you're quite the dick. I can see how you've amassed 1900 posts in a little more than a year.
  • Reply 3 of 15
    ionyzionyz Posts: 491member
    I haven't had any problems yet. (11GB on PATA)
  • Reply 4 of 15
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
    Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.



    Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.



    Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

  • Reply 5 of 15
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Actually, I've seen this as well.



    Let it sit for a minute, and it comes back from la-la-land.
  • Reply 6 of 15
    Quote:

    Originally posted by wilco

    wow...you're quite the dick. I can see how you've amassed 1900 posts in a little more than a year.



    well now that you updated that first post it makes a lot more sense.
  • Reply 7 of 15
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Just saw this again...



    But playing a QuickTime movie in Safari. Same symptoms - lock up of media playback, a stuttering noise from the audio circuitry, then a full 'freeze'... waited a minute, and sure enough, it came back, but Safari crashed.



    I think the problem is in the QuickTime layer - which makes more sense if it's causing a seizure of the Window Server.
  • Reply 8 of 15
    wilcowilco Posts: 985member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by AirSluf

    Did you carefully check that your library path is correct after the update? It sounds more like you hacked the music library location to a removable drive and it isn't being properly seen now. If that's the case it's not Apples problem, you need to re-do your symlinks.



    Why would you consider keeping my music folder on an external drive "hacked"?



    It can be assigned wherever I like as a Preference option. Am I misunderstanding you?



    Any, the problem is very specific. It occurs with iTunes, even if no other app is running. And, sometimes it comes back to life -- but most of the time not. Recent speculation on the Apple Board suggests that the cause may be a fragmented drive, or insufficient HD space.
  • Reply 9 of 15
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
    Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.



    Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.



    Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

  • Reply 10 of 15
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by AirSluf

    Not entirely mis-understanding me, but I never had any luck with removable drives and ensuring everything stays properly connected, but have read where folks used their own symlinks to do the trick and get around those issues. As I said earlier, if you had not hacked the sym-links that would not be the case now, would it???



    Um... I don't think he ever mentioned symlinks. You did. Sounds like he used the Preferences panel to assign it. Clarification, wilco? Looks like another bad assumption.



    Quote:

    I haven't seen these issues on my boxen (yet) and have done both iTunes and QT updates so I can't guess more specifically beyond the major difference between our installs that you have a library on a removable source that might potentially have confused things during the upgrade. I would definitely reset the preference path to your library and maybe try re-installing iTunes, in case something randomly borked during the update.



    *cough*



    I'm seeing it too. Library in default place. Also happened in Safari during QuickTime playback.



    wilco, his suggestion of checking the path isn't a bad one, but AirSluf, if that were the case, then NONE of his music would be playable. I have to dittohead the disk fragmentation and low free space possibilities though... they don't make any sense in this case.
  • Reply 11 of 15
    airslufairsluf Posts: 1,861member
    Kickaha and Amorph couldn't moderate themselves out of a paper bag. Abdicate responsibility and succumb to idiocy. Two years of letting a member make personal attacks against others, then stepping aside when someone won't put up with it. Not only that but go ahead and shut down my posting priviledges but not the one making the attacks. Not even the common decency to abide by their warning (afer three days of absorbing personal attacks with no mods in sight), just shut my posting down and then say it might happen later if a certian line is crossed. Bullshit flag is flying, I won't abide by lying and coddling of liars who go off-site, create accounts differing in a single letter from my handle with the express purpose to decieve and then claim here that I did it. Everyone be warned, kim kap sol is a lying, deceitful poster.



    Now I guess they should have banned me rather than just shut off posting priviledges, because kickaha and Amorph definitely aren't going to like being called to task when they thought they had it all ignored *cough* *cough* I mean under control. Just a couple o' tools.



    Don't worry, as soon as my work resetting my posts is done I'll disappear forever.

  • Reply 12 of 15
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    Funny, I had this happen a few days ago too. I thought it was a fluke since I recently connected to a networked PC hard drive and have had glitches before. I also had iTunes open but in the background along with several other applications.
  • Reply 13 of 15
    I'm glad someone else has this problem as well. I've had it on both my iMac G4/800 and my new PBG4 1.5/15. Very annoying. The way it works for me is iTunes will skip, user interface will freeze, iTunes music will come back in short bursts every minute or so and if I wait long enough the computer will come back. Often I'll just restart cause it's such a PITA to wait.
  • Reply 14 of 15
    wilcowilco Posts: 985member
    FWIW, I haven't had a chance to defrag the drive yet, but I did clear some space off of it -- I was down to my last 10GB of a 160GB drive.



    Since then, I haven't used iTunes enough to be confident about the status, but it hasn't locked up again -- yet.
  • Reply 15 of 15
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by AirSluf

    The only other wild and whacky thing from the wayback machine is maybe someone reintroduced a contiguous memory requirement in the latest quicktime update. [/B]



    Oh snap. I think you may have nailed it.



    I just had the same thing happen, but with iTunes and VLC paused, a QT stream playing in Safari, and I dragged a bunch of PNG files to Preview. (A bunch of other apps were open too, including iChat.)



    I got top up in the Terminal, and the kernel_task was going mad. The disk was thrashing, and the VM was in pain.



    Guess which apps were all frozen? Yup, the ones using QT, and *only* the ones using QT. Force quit iTunes, iChat, Preview and VLC, then got Safari to respond enough to close the window with the QT stream. Bam. Everything came back Snappy(tm) and the thrashing stopped.



    Houston, we have a QT memory allocation bug.
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