Itunes refuses to load--xml damaged

[spatzi]

I loaded 3 new songs this morning, then got an error that Itunes had to shut down. It then started trying to read the xml file on reloading and then said it was damaged. I ended up getting about 10% of my library back. I then dumped the songs it had loaded, then added my music folder again. (360 gigs) After about an hour, it was finished, then I got the error again, "Itunes needs to shut down'.

I then moved all the old xml files out of the the itunes folder, uninstalled itunes, re-installed the latest 64 bit Itunes, and tried adding the music folder again. Again, won't finish loading the songs. Get the same Itunes has to close error.

Windows 7, computer is 3 months old. Never had a problem before.

...rebooted..it started running chk disc on the drive. Something not right there.

...okay finished chk disc. Trying to load my 360 gig music folder. It only loads 89 gigs. Is the rest corrupted?

...Bizarre. I started to add sections of music folder one at a time, a, b, c, d. It was adding folders it didn't add before, so I figured I'd just keep going in small batches. I grabbed all the F folders and started to add them, and INSTANT BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH. What would cause this? I had run AVG scan on everything and it didn't find anything infected.

on reboot chk dsc ran again, repairing or throwing out corrupted files.

...Now, when I add 'one folder at a time in the F's', no problem.

[Eric T Cheng]

iTunes sucks. 'nuff said.

[spatzi]

iTunes sucks. 'nuff said.

I totally agree. Now to find a suitable replacement that looks somewhat the same.

[sinfony]

Songbird looks more or less the same.

[rei]

Don't know if this (http://sourceforge.net/projects/itunesrepair/) works for iTunes 9 but Google might help turn up some suggestions. Maybe this (http://jayurbzz.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/damaged-itunes-library-xml-file/). I won't mock you or iTunes or else karma will bite me in the ass.

[spatzi]

Now I've got the problem that I turn on the computer, it's running chkdsc on the drive, finding errors, correcting them, and they seem to be mp3 related. Is the drive about to fail? It's a 600 gig Western digital drive. Usually, when errors start happening, it's a sign of imminent failure. Or is it something with the itunes library xml getting corrupted constantly? My song folder was fine for the last 3 months since I installed it on the new computer.

Any recommendations for a 'free' hard drive checking utility for this drive? I'll start moving everything off tomorrow just in case.

[chequers]

Look, if your computer is blue screening, it's not iTunes at fault. Blue screens are caused by a kernel or driver fault. You have a hardware or driver issue.

It sounds like faulty hard drive or motherboard from here, but could be anything including a particularly evil virus.

For the record, I have 90gb of music in iTunes and it works fine. iTunes might suck, but every other media library on the planet sucks morer.

[chequers]

Any recommendations for a 'free' hard drive checking utility for this drive? I'll start moving everything off tomorrow just in case.
If you are seeing these problems it's quite possible that the hard drive is corrupting files when it attempts to read/write them. You do have backups right?

[namlook]

iTunes sucks. 'nuff said.


More accurately, iTunes on Windows sucks. It is actually much better on OSX.

[sinfony]

iTunes might suck, but every other media library on the planet sucks morer.
This is manifestly untrue.

[spatzi]

Okay, Things are getting worse, even though I managed to get all my music loaded and working.

On boot up today, chkdsk is now running through the C drive, which is an SSD. That's the first time it did that. Got a lot of 'recovering orphaned files (jpegs - probably album art which itunes stores there), correcting error in index entries, deleting index entries, verifying security descriptors.

Next problem. I start Opera browser. Get 'failed to load opera dll because invaild access to memory location.' I research that. Someone says check dep settings in control panel. I try to turn it off for opera, won't let me. I'm using IE now to write this.

- While in control panel, I check computer problems. It tells me that 'windows security is turned off', and it won't turn on. Also tells me that I had an 'ati graphics problem at 4pm yesterday, which is around the time I had the blue screen.

So to summarise. I'm now getting chk dsc running everytime I boot, on either the one hard drive, and today, the SSD drive; 2) can't run Opera, 3) can't turn on Windows security.

Hard drive failure, graphics card failure? I just tried running a game and it was fine. I also ran AVG virus scan on the SSD drive. No problems.

...rebooted again. This time chkdsc ran automatically on C drive first (SSD), then the E drive (WD). Found no oprhaned files on either this time. Ran Opera and it opened.

Where do I check to see if chkdsc is set to run on every boot up because it's running everytime.

...Oh great! An hour ago, Itunes ran fine. Now, I start it up and get the 'importing itunes library xml' again and it's still running for ten minutes? I just reloaded everything from scratch yesterday and that took me hours. What's going on here?


...Ran HD tune on the ssd and the regular drive. No errors or problems found.

[rei]

Are you overclocking? Systematic crc corruption?

[spatzi]

Are you overclocking? Systematic crc corruption?

I'm not overclocking.

[spatzi]

I ran process explorer while it's trying to load itunes and this is the message:

Error 8
Error 7
Error 6
Error 5
Error 4
Error 3
Error 2
Error 1
Apple Application Support was not found.
Apple Application Support is required to run iTunes. Please uninstall iTunes, then install iTunes again.
iTunes was not installed correctly. Please reinstall iTunes.
iTunes requires Windows XP SP2 or later.
Please make sure compatibility mode is disabled in the Compatibility tab of the properties for iTunes.exe.
InstallDir
Software\Apple Inc.\Apple Application Support
Software\Apple Inc.\Apple Software Support


I already reinstalled this yesterday.

[chequers]

Sounds like a dying hard drive to me.


This is manifestly untrue.
What else exists that keeps my music folder organised, has smart playlists which are easy to use, grabs albumart off the net, has podcast support, a decent store and doesn't fall over when you add >50gb music?

[spatzi]

Sounds like a dying hard drive to me.




A failing SSD drive after 3 months use? Is that a new record? I thought these things were supposed to last longer than disc drives?

[sinfony]

What else exists that keeps my music folder organised, has smart playlists which are easy to use, grabs albumart off the net, has podcast support, a decent store and doesn't fall over when you add >50gb music?
There's an element of personal preference here, but I have issues with iTunes on every one of those fronts.

1) Yes, it will keep your music folder organized, but keeping a music folder organized manually isn't hard. When I buy music online from Amazon, it downloads into my music folder. I spend three seconds copying the album folder into that band's folder in my collection. Done. When I rip a CD, Foobar or EAC asks me where I want the files and I tell it. Again, three seconds. Compare to iTunes, which has at times created duplicate copies of files, renamed files to include an underscore at the end for no reason, and has an inexplicable fondness for declaring something a "Compilation" and sticking it in the directory for compilations. Plus, Foobar will do it all for you and gives you fine-grain control over where to put files and what to name them.

2) Foobar has smart playlists. I suppose they're less easy to use than iTunes in that you have to learn its syntax and then type them in manually instead of selecting from drop downs, but the flip side of that is that they're more powerful and quicker to do once you grok the way they work. I would be surprised to find that Winamp or MediaMonkey didn't have similar functionality.

3) It grabs album art off the net, but it sticks it in tags (where it does not belong) and doesn't let you do much with it. With my Foobar setup, I have a nice big Now Playing display with the album art and a spectrograph visualizer, which simply isn't possible with iTunes (although there's probably some third-party plugin that lets you do a similar thing).

4) Why does your media player need to be an RSS reader? Use an RSS reader to download podcasts, rather than spend thirty seconds waiting for iTunes to load up and do the same thing.

5) Amazon MP3.

6) What media player falls over with that large a library? I mean, other than iTunes, which keeps its library in a giant XML document that's prone to going wrong and causing iTunes to do bizarre things, hence this thread. And god knows I love re-rating all my songs every time I move them to a new computer because iTunes loves to put album art in tags but keep useful info like rating in a giant XML document that is prone to going wrong.

In short, iTunes does all the things you say, but in a bloated and semi-competent way. I prefer using a few different programs to replicate all that functionality (essentially: Foobar for the audio player, Album Art Downloader for album art, FeedDemon for podcasts, and Amazon MP3/artist websites for buying music online) without the headaches, plus handy features like better codec support, Replay Gain support, and not taking five minutes to do the simplest of tasks.

[Joe M.]

I don't particularly like iTunes but I much prefer using one app for all my audio and music needs. I've dabbled a bit with demos for other media players but they all lack one or two features that I find incredibly useful in iTunes (notably: podcast support, smart playlists and Genius for quick and dirty playlists).

[Brian Rubin]

iTunes sucks. 'nuff said.
Agreed, but sometimes you gotta use it, like backing up or updating one's iPhone. :(

[chequers]

A failing SSD drive after 3 months use? Is that a new record? I thought these things were supposed to last longer than disc drives?
Mine failed after five!

[spatzi]

Every bootup up now chkdsc is running. This morning it was 'truncating badly linked attribute records' (2 files). then it found orphaned (mp3) files again. (around 20-30) This was on my music drive which has the 360 gigs of music. I don't even have itunes installed right now. Should I try replacing the entire music folder with my back up?

I ran HD tune on this drive and it didn't find any errors so why is it running chkdsc all the time? I also ran the 'fusutil dirty query' and it's clean.

[chequers]

Are you still refusing to believe the drive is dying? I can't help you then.

[spatzi]

Are you still refusing to believe the drive is dying? I can't help you then.

Which drive? The SSD or the regular hard drive?

[Athryn]

Songbird looks more or less the same.

Thanks for this recommendation! I have been annoyed at iTunes a bit lately for how memory hoggy it is and how it causes some of my games to hitch up when it switches to the next song. I decided to check out Songbird, and so far I really like it. It slurped up all my music from my iTunes library and kept the ratings, which is pretty important to me, since I have a lot of music.

The plugins are pretty nifty, as well.

[spatzi]

I dumped Itunes. After reinstalling it, and loading my entire 360 gig from a DIFFERENT hardrive, and still getting 'Itunes stopped working' followed by blue screen of death, I installed Media monkey. Uses a lot less cpu, only 7mb size.

I don't think my hard drive was the problem. I had 5 critical error crashes all related to itunes in the last week, and they still happened even when using a different hard drive for the music. Itunes ran fine for 3 months of use, and now it loads the new library once, and the next day when I run it again, the itunes library file is corrupt again.

Only problem with dumping itunes: I can no longer load apps to my itouch. Basically, Apple just lost me as a customer. I spent at least $300 in apps in the last year. Now I doubt I'll be buying any again, unless they are small enough to load directly to the itouch and don't need itunes.

[Morberis]

But was itunes still installed to the same drive? ....

[sinfony]

Only problem with dumping itunes: I can no longer load apps to my itouch. Basically, Apple just lost me as a customer. I spent at least $300 in apps in the last year. Now I doubt I'll be buying any again, unless they are small enough to load directly to the itouch and don't need itunes.
So is there no way to get apps on an iPod Touch without using iTunes? I've been thinking about getting one, but not if it means I have to let iTunes anywhere near my music.

[spatzi]

Yes, Itunes was still installed on the same drive (SSD). I had another crash today, even with Itunes and all its associated programs dumped. Checked event logs around the time of the crash and it was the 7001 error.

The peer networking service depends on the peer name resolution protocol which failed to start because of the following error: %%-2140993535

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd349438(WS.10).aspx

Within a one minute period, it tried to start the service 3 times, and then blue screen. How do I find out what service it's referring to? Now I don't know what the problem: Itunes, hard disc drive, SSD drive, or service control manager screwing up. That error is the only one I can find in proximity to the critical crash in event logs (even though the time stamp is 'after' a minute after the crash) , and here is the details of the 7001 error:

param1 Peer Networking Grouping
param2 Peer Name Resolution Protocol
param3 %%-2140993535

If I look up error 7001 on Microsoft's list of error codes, I get this:

ERROR_CTX_WINSTATION_NAME_INVALID
7001 (0x1B59)
The specified session name is invalid.

Details on the critical event that caused the crash:

BugcheckCode 0
BugcheckParameter1 0x0
BugcheckParameter2 0x0
BugcheckParameter3 0x0
BugcheckParameter4 0x0
SleepInProgress false
PowerButtonTimestamp 0

[Moggraider]

spatzi: new HDD time.


Sounds like a dying hard drive to me.
What else exists that keeps my music folder organised, has smart playlists which are easy to use, grabs albumart off the net, has podcast support, a decent store and doesn't fall over when you add >50gb music?

iTunes is actually the worst at large libraries than any music program I've tried in the past decade. It's really only usable for smaller libraries, because yes, it will start to lose its shit once you've loaded up. The OP sounds exactly like iTunes crapping itself out, like it did on me repeatedly before I gave up on it.

[Lorini]

I'm just not re-creating my 30 or so playlists to get them out of iTunes. Also since I'm buying an Ipad I'd need some other way to play music on it too.

[Athryn]

I'm just not re-creating my 30 or so playlists to get them out of iTunes. Also since I'm buying an Ipad I'd need some other way to play music on it too.

That's the nice thing about Songbird, it actually snarfs all that stuff up from Itunes, and keeps Itunes updated if you make any changes on the Songbird side, so that if you're still using it to sync an iPod, you can.

I was hesitant to try anything else for a long time because I have like 30,000 rated songs, as well as a bunch of playlists, and all that stuff came over.

They also have a couple of addons that mimic the Genius function.

[Morberis]

spatzi: new HDD time.



iTunes is actually the worst at large libraries than any music program I've tried in the past decade. It's really only usable for smaller libraries, because yes, it will start to lose its shit once you've loaded up. The OP sounds exactly like iTunes crapping itself out, like it did on me repeatedly before I gave up on it.


Really? I had WMP 11 crap out on me far far more, losing everything and taking longer to load in the first place.

Also if you have a large library, especially if you have wave files, backup the players library file just in case the worst happens. Re-labeling 600 wave files just because you couldn't backup a 30mb folder sucks.

[chequers]

WAVE FILES? Every media player in the world supports one lossless format or another. Think of the hard drive space!

[spatzi]

I unhooked the WD hard drive before booting this morning, just to see if I get a crash again today, and if this hard drive is causing the problem. Ten minutes in, another crash. New record!

So, it looks like my OCZ Agility 60 gig drive is toast even though all checks on the drive show it 'error free'. Unbelievable. I've got 8 year old hard drives still running on my backup computer and a brand new SSD lasts for 3 months? Now I'm not so sure about replacing my C drive with another SSD.

[rei]

Anand's died fairly quickly but his was Crucial brand: http://anandtech.com/show/2974/crucial-s-realssd-c300-an-update-on-my-drive

[Chris Nahr]

And that's why I'm still saying that SSD technology is immature...

[Morberis]

WAVE FILES? Every media player in the world supports one lossless format or another. Think of the hard drive space!

It would be a real pain to convert 500+ songs, and why bother when hard drive space is pennies?

[sinfony]

Spatzi: what anti-virus program/operating system are you using?

[spatzi]

Spatzi: what anti-virus program/operating system are you using?

AVG free. Windows 7.

I think I tracked down the problem. It's not the drives, it's likely the ram. I ran memtest and got instant ram failure messages, after running for barely a minute. This is what's causing the corruption and the constant crashes.
I have 2 sticks of 2 gig Corsair ram so I will try switching them out tomorrow. This is easier to handle than SSD drive failure and reinstall of windows and all programs.

[XPav]

It would be a real pain to convert 500+ songs, and why bother when hard drive space is pennies?

Yes, it'd take at least a minute to queue up in a decent media converter with the end result that much more songs would fit on portable devices.

[sinfony]

AVG free. Windows 7.

I think I tracked down the problem. It's not the drives, it's likely the ram. I ran memtest and got instant ram failure messages, after running for barely a minute. This is what's causing the corruption and the constant crashes.
I have 2 sticks of 2 gig Corsair ram so I will try switching them out tomorrow. This is easier to handle than SSD drive failure and reinstall of windows and all programs.
Yeah, that's a RAM issue. I would also note that I had frequent blue screens from AVG/Windows 7 combination. I'd like to think they've fixed that by now, but it's free software and it kinda sucks. If you're not particularly attached to it, I'd try out Microsoft Security Essentials in its place.

[Morberis]

Yes, it'd take at least a minute to queue up in a decent media converter with the end result that much more songs would fit on portable devices.

But why when your portable device possesses a big enough hard drive to contain it all and more anyway? And then you have problems with tags, no no it all seems such a bother when you're encountering no problems in the first place. Better just to do what any prudent individual would do in the first place and backup their library files. Also nice to note while lossless waves work with everything, most other lossless formats do not, and what happens down the road when you want to change to a new player? Sure you can convert them all, but if you're just going to convert them every few years whats the point of going lossless in the first place?

Because who know what other normally taggable files seem to have lost or otherwise misplaced their tags.