iTunes Match hangs at "Gathering Information" stage and never completes.

Fingleberries

Hi All,

I am having the following problem on my computer (running iTunes 10.5.2 on Win7 x64)

I don't have a huge library of music (~1,000 songs) and have signed up for iTunes Match and now iTunes Match hangs indefinitely on the "Gathering information" stage and never complete. iTunes is using about 20-30% CPU time while this is happening, and the iTunes Match and Genius nodes in iTunes are both 'spinning' as if they were busy.

I can still use iTunes to listen to music, but that is beside the point if I can't use the feature I have just paid €24.99 for.


I have a case open with Apple Support, but awaiting to hear anything back. Any tips from anyone else would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
F.

Doodah7

How long are you waiting?? I have about 15,000 songs in my library and Stage 1 gathering information took about four hours yesterday.

Fingleberries

It's been about three hours so far, and I've only 742 songs in total. Personally, I don't think it is doing anything at this point other than using up CPU Cycles.

vinnycoyne

You can hit Stop and it'll pick up from where you left off next time you start iTunes Match. Try doing that and restart iTunes.

Fingleberries

Hi Vinny,

Thanks for the tip, I gave it a shot but unfortunately it gets to the same point again and doesn't go any further.

...
Just to get a little bit Techie on this. I ran ProcMon to see what iTunes is doing at this time, and I can see that it processes all of the music and media files in my Library (attempts to read and get the details) and then it seems to get stuck in some sort of a loop constantly trying to access the Genius and iTunes Library extras journal files.

• itunes library Extras.itdb-journal
• itunes Library Genius.itdb-journal

But it cannot find the files under the iTunes folder. I am not sure if this is related, but will continue to dig further and update if I manage to resolve this.

Fingleberries

OK, I have had some success after the above steps with ProcMon. In addition to the infite looping of the two files above, I noticed (very quickly because there were thousands of attempts for the above two files) that a specific track filename appeared in the list of file attempts.

I stopped iTunes Match, browsed for the track in iTunes and then found the file in Windows Explorer to confirm that the file matched the one shown in ProcMon. I deleted the file via iTunes and then exited iTunes and started again.

Now it works - thanks to all for any tips.


So, here is a bit of a write up of how I resolved it, just in case it helps anyone else. Apologies if it gets a bit messy, or doesn't resolve the issue for your environment:

1. Downloaded Process Monitor from Microsoft Sysinternals.
2. Run this on your machine that has iTunes installed.
3. You will see a lot of information appearing on screen here. As soon as you see iTunes.exe appear on the list under Process Name, right-click on it and select "Include iTunes.exe" - this will ignore all other processes in future.
4. Press CTRL+A to enable Automatic Scrolling of the events recorded.
5. You will see it process all of the songs in your library (which might be a lot).
6. After a while you will see that it appears to go into a loop looking for the files: itunes library Extras.itdb-journal and itunes Library Genius.itdb-journal
7. This may go on for some time, if you watch closely, you may occasionally see a music track name appear. This is likely the culprit, try to find this song in iTunes and remove it from the library.
8. Close iTunes and launch it again. Then try to run iTunes Match. It should run through successfully.

Notes: If you have a library larger than mine (~750 songs), it is possible that there may be more than one problematic track and you may need to repeat the above steps a few times before it actually works successfully.

It would appear that the issue for me stemmed from 'Missing Artwork' for a song - Extreme Ways by Moby - which is a song that I had actually bought from iTunes about a year ago.

Anyway. Hope that helps anyone who may be having the same problem.

nathan1899

I also got it fixed by "Repairing" Itunes.exe from inside Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features in windows (Vista).

Inside Control Panel\Programs\Programs and Features just right-click on Itunes.exe and choose "repair", not uninstall. Once Itunes repairs itself, it should work. At least it did for me.

I think my error was caused by the fact I had moved my library between different computers.

Shane732

I'm having this problem on a Macbook - any similar fix?