iTune crashes everytime I insert a cd

October 10, 2010 4:42 PM

iTunes crashes everytime I put in a cd.

I've already posted this on an Apple message board, but no one has answered and I am pretty sure no one will. This is making me crazy.

So this is on my MBP (from mid-2008), Mac OS X 10.6.4, and the latest iTunes. I've had weird issues ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard. At first, iTunes crashed everytime I opened the store. I deleted the preferences and that fixed it.

I've wiped my HD and re-installed SL. I've repaired permissions a million times. I've reinstalled iTunes, trashed it's prefs. I've downloaded and used a cache cleaner (that actually fixed a weird error I was getting upon starting up the Terminal). I've also turned off the auto look-up of song titles.

I can insert a cd and play it using Quicktime. iTunes crashes every time. The crash report is in the Apple link above. Does anyone have any idea? It's making me a little crazy because I'd like to import some more music onto my machine and iTunes is what I use. I'm frustrated because I normally can figure out how to fix any Mac issues I have and this just stumps me.

posted by jdl to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Does the crash happen when you use a fresh user account?

Does the crash happen right after a clean reinstall, or only after you've reinstalled software--including components or codecs like DivX or Perian or Flip4Mac?
posted by bcwinters at 5:00 PM on October 10, 2010

Yes, I created a fresh user account yesterday and the same thing happened.

Good question--I don't remember how soon after a clean reinstall I noticed this crash (I hadn't tried to import cds in months). I do have DivX installed, but not Perian or Flip4Mac this around.
posted by jdl at 5:13 PM on October 10, 2010

Try turning off error correction in iTunes (Preferences>General: Import Settings).
posted by jamaro at 6:35 PM on October 10, 2010

If you can't fix it, you could try ripping the CD through another program (NMP3, Max) and then just copy those files into iTunes.

As far as solutions for iTunes, see this thread on Apple Discussion. Key search term is "EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)". Fairly generic in that it just means some application was accessing memory it should not have been, but a good start. One user seemed to have luck removing some particular fonts:

I deleted the copy of Curlz MT that was installed by Office (Office/Fonts). CS3 and iTunes now work again. -MsMorgan

Another mentions updating/reinstalling Java, repairing permissions, clearing ~/Library/Caches, /Library/Caches, and /System/Library/Caches.
posted by sophist at 11:40 PM on October 10, 2010

Thanks so much everyone. I'll check out that thread on Apple, but in the meantime I've downloaded NMP3 and am ripping a cd right now. Whew! I'll keep trying to fix the iTunes issue, but at least I can get music onto my machine now.

If any of these things work, I'll update this thread. So far caches have been cleared and there's no Curlz MT on my machine. Next up: java.
posted by jdl at 5:54 AM on October 11, 2010

Instead of NMP3 or Max, you might want to use X Lossless Decoder which does error detection correctly. Pretty much everything else ignores that fact that your drive has a cache, and merrily compares the cached data with itself, so — surprise! — never sees an error.
posted by scruss at 6:33 AM on October 11, 2010

I just tried out Max to rip a cd and keep getting an error that it cannot tag files and "iTunes got an error: Connection is invalid", looks like I need to use anything that is not touching iTunes.
posted by jdl at 3:20 PM on October 11, 2010

Follow up: After trying forever, I brought it to the Apple store and... I had a bad hard drive. Replaced it with AppleCare and all is well.
posted by jdl at 12:34 PM on November 10, 2010