Careful Upgrading to iTunes 7.2
First and foremost, I suggest making a backup of your iTunes library before you upgrade to the newest version. You already have a backup routine that has done a complete system backup in the last week anyway… right!
That being said, you may experience some difficulties syncing your iPod with music that you ripped from a CD after you have upgraded to iTunes 7.2. Especially if one or more songs match music that you had also bought from the iTunes Store. The error message I received was as follows:
“While syncing to <iPod device name>, the file <song name> was not copied because the file type is not supported by the iPod”
After several hours of fiddling with the MP3 file’s ID3 Tags and trying to rebuild the iTunes Library, I finally found the following fixit solution.
- For each song that shows up in the error dialog box, find it in your iTunes library and copy it to a new location (I used my desktop).
- Once the file has been copied to a new location, delete the file which is in your iTunes library by clicking on it from within iTunes and pressing the delete key. If you are prompted to keep the file or move it to the trash, choose to move it to the trash.
- Re-import that song back into you iTunes library by clicking and dragging the copy of the file back into the iTunes window.
- Sync your iPod again to confirm that 1) the file does not show up in the error list and 2) you can see and play the song on your iPod
- You may need to iterate through this process several times as the sync error log seems to only show 100 songs at a time. If you have more than 100 songs that won’t sync, you may not know it until your next sync.
I hope this little incompatibility or file corruption just applies to me. However, I suspect that the iTunes 7.2 upgrade might cause problems for more people in the coming days. Please leave your thoughts, complaints and suggestions in the comment section of this post. I’d like to know if this is a small problem or if it’s more wide-spread.
[UPDATE 2007-05-31 1:32 PM]
There’s a new discussion and several other solutions available in the Apple support forums:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4645674
[UPDATE 2007-06-01 9:42 AM]
Playlist Magazine has an article, in which they call this problem a bug. However, I’m still inclined to think that this was intentional behavior from Apple to test the waters on how many people had indeed burned their iTunes Store music out to CD and then reimported it.
http://playlistmag.com/weblogs/ipodblog/2007/06/itunes72gotcharedux/index.php
[...] Yesterday, I upgraded to iTunes 7.2 across all my Macs to take advantage of the higher bitrate ITMS songs. Things seemed to go smoothly, until I tried to sync with my iPod and got hit by this “bug”. [...]
Pingback by Robot Monkey Pants » Apple broke Front Row June 3, 2007 at about 12:20 pm
Just as a note from the trenches– this tip works, but you’ll have to redo your playlists with the “new” versions of the songs (unless someone’s come up with a quick fix for this..). Might want to copy the playlists so you know what to import once the “old” files are gone.
Said by MB June 7, 2007 at about 10:34 pm
Fraid it’s not just you - I also had this problem, as discussed on this thread.
Strange though, it was only one album, even though I’ve done this same procedure (purchase and download as AAC, burn to CD, rip as MP3) for tens of albums recently :S
Said by Andy Shellam June 12, 2007 at about 3:00 pm
i upgraded to 7.2 but my problems different, it crashes as soon as i load it up, n i cant roll back to a previous version so im pretty much screwed.. worked fine until i upgraded tho :/
Said by AP June 17, 2007 at about 5:13 pm
I cannot even download 7.2. When I click on it it does absolutely nothing. I am unable to download movies and podcasts and some CD’s because I already downloaded 7.0 BUT my computer does not recognize it. Any suggestions?
Said by Stacey June 24, 2007 at about 3:56 pm
ever time i try to run my itunes 7.2 i get this
(itunes cannot run because it has detected a problem with your audio configuration????
Said by carlos June 25, 2007 at about 4:16 pm
Thanks for the post. I found my Macbook Pro would no longer open any of the Microsoft Office applications (and a bunch of others) after installing the combined Mac OS X updater (that includes ITunes 7.2.) I found instructions to rebuild the precompiled headers, but then ran into a problem where the Java 1.6 Developer Preview would crash the precompiler utility. I called Apple support and their product specialist said that a number of people are affected. This update is a mess. -Frank
Said by Frank Cohen July 29, 2007 at about 8:57 pm
Hey Carlos…i had the same problem but i know how u fix it…first, go to control panel and go to add or remove programs. Next, go to Quicktime (quicktime runs itunes) then push install.when a screen comes up push repair and it will reinstall Quicktime.(DO NOT REINSTALL ITUNES…IF U DO YOUR SCREWED!).next open Itunes and everything will be there. ENJOY =D
Said by Garrett August 1, 2007 at about 10:43 pm
One more thing…if u reinstall itunes you will lose alll your music…it happened to me..so just reinstall quicktime.
Said by Garrett August 1, 2007 at about 10:45 pm
yeah so im nervous about upgrading because the last time i did it all my songs were erased and i had to start over
Said by macgirl December 12, 2007 at about 5:43 am