Reverting to a previous version of iTunes?

October 14, 2008 10:49 AM

How do I revert to a previous version of iTunes? Or just make the goddamn thing work with my Airport Express the way it did before one of their recent updates?

Since upgrading to the newest version of iTunes, it will only play music wirelessly via my airport express at a practically inaudible level, to the extent that to make it the volume I would like demands turning my stereo up and creating terrible sound distortion.

Apparently others have been experiencing this problem too, but Apple aren't in too much of a hurry to fix it. I have tried downloading an old version of iTunes but when I try to install it I get: "You cannot install iTunes on this volume. A newer version of iTunes is already installed."

I'm a bit wary of messing too much with things for the sake of the music library, so please, someone who knows what they're talking about - how do I ditch the new iTunes update?

posted by rose selavy to computers & internet (5 comments total)

FWIW: I had to reinstall and turn off genius on mine, because I have my library on an external hard drive and it crashed every time I tried to launch itunes. There seems to be a lot of bugs with the latest version, and I got the same message as you when I tried to roll it back. I'm guessing Apple is working on a number of issues all at once, but hopefully they'll get a fix out soon.
posted by indiebass at 10:55 AM on October 14, 2008

You don't say what OS you're running. Tiger? Leopard? WinXP?

Surely, you have a backup you can revert to? Apple even makes backing up and restoring easy with Time Machine in Leopard...

Even if you strip out the iTunes.pkg Receipt file in /Library/Receipts which would bypass the message you're getting (assuming you're running Mac OS X here), it still won't allow you to revert your iTunes library to 7.x. When you launched iTunes 8, it updated your iTunes library. There's no easy way to go back barring restoring from a backup.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 11:09 AM on October 14, 2008

You could try uninstalling and reinstalling an older version downloaded from oldversion.com.
posted by MikeMc at 11:18 AM on October 14, 2008

Removing iTunes from OSX.

I just did this after accidentally including iTunes in my Mac update, and my library seems to be working just fine.
posted by stefanie at 11:22 AM on October 14, 2008

A thread on downgrading itunes.

I looked into this recently but I can't find the notes: When you upgrade, itunes backs up the library files. If you downgrade you should go to the backup it made of the old library files. You can then drag the folder of media into itunes to have it re-add everything you've added since upgrading; it won't duplicate anything, though typos & stuff deleted from itunes but not the media folder pops up again.

You could set up a playlist of recently added media, & re-add that, but I can't find directions for that.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:49 PM on October 14, 2008