Fixing iTunes when it freezes
I recently ran into a problem with my iTunes where every time I would start it, almost immediately it would freeze: that is, I could see all my music, it was trying to download new podcasts, and the spinning rainbow wheel came up and wouldn’t go away. Going to Force Quit showed iTunes not responding.
After looking around the web for help I saw that the iTunes database can easily get messed up. One of the reasons is a “bad” podcast. Recently I had a problem with a podcast that would appear to download (I watched it complete in the download window) but afterwards it didn’t appear in the list of podcasts. I went to the website of the podcast and watched it there and didn’t think anything of it but at this point I guessed that it was causing my problem.
The solution offered on the web when this happens is to remove your iTunes database and then reimport all your music. I moved out the files and sure enough iTunes did work again. However, this solution would have required me to resubscribe to all my podcasts again and there are way more than I want to have to add manually.
So I figured out on my own a much better way to do it.
First, run the PropertyListEditor application (that comes with your Mac) and open the file: /username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iTunes.plist that is under your user account. N.B. with any playing around with files like this make sure to BACKUP the original file.
Click on the triangle next to Root to see the list of cookies. Near the top of the list will be disablePodcasts and it will be set to No (meaning that you can watch or listen to podcasts). Click on the word No and select Yes (to disable podcasts). Then save the file.
Restart iTunes and it should now work but the word Podcasts will now be missing from the Library.
Bring up the iTunes Preferences (from the menu bar) and go to the Parental tab. Uncheck the Disable Podcasts box. Then go to the Podcasts tab and change the menu option for Check for new episodes to Manually. Click on OK and Podcasts should be back in your Library but now they won’t download until you update them manually.
If you are not sure which podcast is causing the problem you will have to use trial and error to find the problem by updating/downloading the podcast and seeing if it freezes again (and force quiting and restarting iTunes). In my case, I could see on the list of podcasts the one that it was trying to download (the greyed out name appeared) when it froze and that probably was the problem. This was good because it was the podcast I already suspected.
When you have found the problem podcast Delete it and then resubcribe to just that one podcast. Update that podcast to test and hopefully it will now succeed. Click on the Refresh button (in the lower right) and see that all the pending podcasts download without freezing.
Finally, go back to the Preference for Podcasts and change the Check for new episodes menu to be what you normally want. Overall, it is a bit of work but a lot less than reimporting your library and resubscribing to all your podcasts.