ITunes 12.3.1.23 and El Capitan Nightmare as well as my previos Synology NAS nightmare!

If you read my blog you know I have been having a nightmare of a time with El Capitan, and the latest is iTunes.

I have a huge library with over 40,000 tracks and many videos.

Now honestly I have been some issues with iTunes for the last 6 months, but that was a very different situation. Years back I decided my iTunes Library was too big to keep within my MacPro, so I had gotten a Synology DS212j NAS to hold my Library. It had 2 3 Terrabyte Hard Drives in a mirrored Raid 1 configuration, with my Library kept locally. There had been some issues moving media because of the different drive file formats (Character Case), but mostly it went well and worked fairly well for a while.

The first problem was all the sudden I lost a bunch of files, and they had been put in a strange folder and renamed. I got in touch with Synology and someone admitted that it was the synology, but never helped. Eventually I tuned off the Synology Cloud Sync app, and it fixed the issue, though I had to re-import all the messed up songs. The synology then worked fine for years, until…

One day I noticed my tracks on playlists on my iPod had gotten weird, so I went into iTunes and realized something had happened to my whole library. While my raitings were still there, 75% of my playlists were completely messed up, with randomized songs, and even worse much of the library was messed up. Not only were many tracks showing up as another song, and when you played them they came back to life as their old song. There were strange doubled tracks, and on the Synology even weirder stuff was going on.

Many tracks had become folders, with the track missing, and completely other songs within the folder from elsewhere in my library.

This is an example. And this was all over my library.

Not only that but tracks were gone and were listed, but were other things like PNGs.

Or even JS files.

And many video files were renamed to different files, or sometimes even different file types. So a video would show up as audio, or audio as video. And some files are just completely missing.

And my Time Machine Library backup had the same issues, so it must have happened a week or two earlier and I didn’t notice until I synced my iPod!

Literally my whole Library was a mess!

I moved the whole thing back to an internal drive, and let iTunes Organize it, but it still left many files on the NAS, though they should have all been copied locally. And I had to manually add back all the files that were put into strange folders within my library. I literally spent the last 6 months fixing it. Deleting all of my playlists and fixing them, and using TuneSpan to figure out which tracks weren’t local and moving them local manually. Finally I had all my files locally in the same folder, and iTunes was working correctly, though I did still have some misnamed video files to figure out.

That is when I upgraded El Capitan. As I have documented before when I upgraded iTunes slowed to a crawl, and was beachballing all the time! Between this and having lost the ability to sign into Messages, I decided to do a fresh install and see if that would fix things.

It didn’t, still no Messages Activation, and iTunes was still slow as hell. I did manage to get iTunes to Organize my files and finally it seemed to work and either just got rid of references to the files on the NAS or copied them over, but as soon as this finished iTunes just completely locked up. As soon as it opened it beachballed literally all the time. I would leave it all day and night and still it would be beachballing.

So I thought I would try starting over by importing my iTunes Library XML into a fresh iTunes that had it’s media set to it’s current location. This was a nightmare in itself as for every iOS app I had it said there was either a newer, older or same version, and would not accept when I said do the same for all, and they would take a while to come up. And once everything was imported, iTunes just started beachballing again and never stopped. The console was lit up with errors, such as the following:

10/30/15 5:49:42.131 PM com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.xpc.launchd.domain.pid.quicklookd.707) Path not allowed in target domain: type = pid, path = /Library/Frameworks/iTunesLibrary.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/com.apple.iT unesLibraryService.xpc error = 147: The specified service did not ship in the requestor’s bundle, origin = /System/Library/Frameworks/QuickLook.framework/Versions/A/Resources/quicklookd. app

10/30/15 6:06:20.814 PM iTunes[724]: ApplePushService: APSConnection being used without a delegate queue

10/30/15 6:07:47.000 PM kernel[0]: process iTunes[724] thread 39388 caught burning CPU! It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 89%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 90.071686 seconds, (89.625322 user, 0.446364 system) ledger info: balance: 90006478766 credit: 90011558608 debit: 5079842 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 100547978800

10/30/15 6:07:48.253 PM spindump[589]: Saved cpu_resource.diag report for iTunes version 12.3.1 (12.3.1.23) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/iTunes_2015-10-30-180748_JonahLees-Serenity.cpu _resource.diag

10/30/15 6:08:40.000 PM kernel[0]: Sandbox: AssetCacheLocato(747) deny(1) file-read-data /Applications/iTunes.app

10/30/15 6:21:16.645 PM mDNSResponder[88]: 63: Could not write data to client PID[724](iTunes) after 10 seconds, 13 replies waiting

10/30/15 6:37:03.000 PM kernel[0]: PM notification timeout (pid 724, iTunes)

And I also posted the SpinDump of my CPU hogging at my blog, in case anyone could help, but got no responses at any online forums.

So I once again removed my iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml and reset the media location to it’s current organized location. This left me with only my Cloud purchases in my library, though not downloaded. So used Fat Cat Software’s PowerTunes  (yes I have bought about anything that could help fix my library in the last 6 months, PowerTunes, TuneSpan, Supersync and TuneUp) to import the media not currently in my Library.

Now most of my media is back, but all my playlists are gone, and even worse all my ratings are gone, and that is literally year and years of rating my music to make smart playlists based on my ratings!

This has literally been one nightmare followed by another! And now I have to go through and re-organize my whole library, remake all of my playlists, and re-rate my over 46,000 tracks in my music library alone! And I am missing still missing tracks from the whole Synology fiasco, as some of the tracks it made folders of just dissapeared when it did it.

Now most of my playlists are easy as they are just albums, as I find it easier to add to my iPod that way, but I also had playlists of best of by year. So all tracks with a certain rating or higher by year randomized, and that is mostly what I listen to. So I have to get through my entire library and rate every track to make those again. And I don’t want to sync my iPod again until I do that!

THIS IS GOING TO TAKE A WHILE!!!!!