iTunes problem.

Hi,

I've come for a help on a problem. It's a big one.

I upgraded from itunes 9.1 to 9.2 the other day (I know, it's been out for awhile, but I only decided to upgrade then.) and I went to boot it up. When I tried, it said something along the lines of it being out of memory?

I've tried the following with no success:

1. Restarting.
2. Following the instructions carefully, and repeatedly, on Apple's official site: Removing iTunes for Mac OS X

3. Trying to 'roll-back' to iTunes 9.1 without doing the instructions on the site listed above, and with.

4. Crying in a corner, and hoping it'll work the next day. (I love my music!)

Here are my computer specs:

Mac OSX Tiger 10.4.11
2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Dio
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
22.74 GB of free space on the 160 GB drive.

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Please help me, I'm pretty desperate, and I'm considering just backing up everything and reinstalling...which I really do not want to do. Anything you guys can do to save my hide is appreciated.

Thanks in advanced.

SolitaryHowl said:

When I tried, it said something along the lines of it being out of memory?

Click to expand...

Is this the only explanation on why iTunes is not working. We need a lot more info to try and help you out .....

Here are my computer specs:

Mac OSX Tiger 10.4.11
2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Dio
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
22.74 GB of free space on the 160 GB drive.

Click to expand...

I would SERIOUSLY look at either backing up and deleting some stuff off your HD or get a new HD because that is seriously really low. This could well be why iTunes isnt working. Your system has about 13% left on your Mac and people recommend at least 20% for close to optimal performance .....

Have you done a clean up yet as with Disk Utility, MainMenu or Oynx for Tiger ??

Might help in getting iTunes up and playing
If you need more help dont be shy in returning and asking the question

Cheers

House slouched

I haven't ran Onyx in a while, I guess I'll do that now.

I did a complete iDefrag around a month or so ago.

And I'll try to clean up more space; I'll come back to say if it worked or not.

Make sure you Repair Permissions while running Onyx.

I'm not even clear with your description using "boot it up" and "restarting" whether the 'out of memory' error is related to launching iTunes or re-booting the machine.

Stating "exactly" what happens with the "exact" error message goes a long way to getting proper help.

Okay, I'll repair permissions with Onyx.

I'm sorry; should have been more clear with what I was trying to say.

When I would boot up itunes, it would say the out of memory error. ("The itunes application could not be opened. There is not enough memory available")

When I said 'restart', I was referring to the restarting of my Mac.

Any more questions?

Just for the record, the 20% "rule" TattooedMac referred to is bunk and has always been bunk.

By this logic, a 1TB drive needs to have 200GB free for "optimum performance." That's PC hogwash is what that is.

OS X needs a sufficient amount of free space to burn discs, handle virtual memory and write temp files. On a 2GB RAM machine, this would be about 12GB free or so. On a 4GB machine, maybe 20GB or so. You'll get no additional performance gain from freeing up more space than that.

People just like mathematical formulas they can follow, and 10% wasn't enough so they rounded up. To the extent that this "rule" makes people aware that they can't fill up the hard drive, it's a good thing. But like most generalizations, it's not really very accurate.

Okay, thanks for the clarification, chas_m.

I did all of Onyx's settings I could find, and now I'm going to try installing v 9.1 again. I had this problem when I upgraded - so I guess I'm not going to upgrade in case the problem comes back. iTunes has been working fine until I tried to upgrade.

Anywho, when I click on the installer for itunes 9.1, it says I need 195MB free; does that sound correct? Also, it says 'upgrade' instead of 'install'. I'm concerned, but I'll try it anyways.

I'll edit this to tell you guys if it worked or not.

EDIT:

No, it didn't work. Darn.

Any more suggestions?

EDIT 2:

I tried installing it in safe mode. Guess what? It worked like a charm, but when I tried to start it in regular OSX, it gave me that same error.

EDIT 3: Created a temporary user (with admin privledges.) Tried to use iTunes, and it worked.

I'm thinking maybe my account has something to do with it. But how to I move everything over to a new account? I have over 90GB of content...

And I'll totally disagree once again with chas_m on this particular point of how much free space should be maintained on a system. It is not bunk. I've seen systems slow down over and over again due to not enough free space on my own systems and on practically every system I've worked on for the past 20 years.

Yes, this includes my Macs. My own recommendation for most is to try and keep 20% free space, and by the time folks hit 15% they "will" see their system slow down. Due to being a gamer and old timer hardware enthusiast, I'm particularly sensitive to this issue of system slow down.

Will your system work with 10GB free space - for many, yes - for some, there's not going to be enough contiguous free space on the drive for many apps to run properly. Is it going to run any where close to the same as it would with a clean install - not a gonna happen.

With my Macs, I begin to see it at roughly 25% free space on my 320 GB drive with the spinning beach ball more often and sitting there for longer periods of time. And by the time it's at 20%, for me, it's become unbearable. The mere act of moving data to one of my storage devices and taking it back to 35-40% free space has eliminated these slow downs that a simple re-boot would not.

While OSX does a great job of defragging files, from the best I can tell, it does nothing to defrag free space on the drive. By the time someone has filled up a drive to the point of 15% free space, they've typically installed and deleted enough stuff that the free space is scattered all over the drive. If an app has page in/outs from multiple different areas on the drive, it will affect the speed of that app.

The smallest free space I've even seen recommended from respected web sites (such as The X Lab) says 12 GB free and was written about 2-3 OS versions back and at a time when the typical drive size was sitting at 80-120 GB.
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On to your issue at hand, if you're able to launch iTunes in another user account, you should have already deleted these files if you followed the kb article you posted - but I'd remove then again.

Quit iTunes, head to your home folder / Library / Preferences and move everything there that has iTunes in it to the desktop - then reboot the machine.

In any case, I deleted a bunch of stuff so now I have 25% of free space.

And I did what you suggested, bobtomay, but no dice. Still showed up with the same error. Maybe I should try rolling back once more to itunes 9.0?

Well, at least we know it has something to do with your individual account and it's not system wide at this point.

I'll do some more digging on it today, as I know you'd rather keep your existing account than have to move everything over, and possibly we'll come up with some more ideas.

Not sure I would try the roll back since you've apparently done that at least a couple of times. Thinking bottom line, that shouldn't be any better than uninstalling iTunes completely and reinstalling 9.2 fresh.

I have already found this same error message all the way back to iTunes 7. Just need to find the fix that fixes yours.

If you had a SuperDuper or CCC backup, I'd be recommending a restore from backup to the point prior to the issue and then trying the update again.

Between the kb article you posted and the other recommendations already made, I have nothing else.

Thanks for helping, anyways. Looks like I have to create a new account.

How do I move everything over to the new account? And can I just move applications over to the new account too, or do I have to reinstall them again in the new account?

If you installed applications to the standard 'Applications' folder, they are installed at the root, not in an individual account. Open up the new user you've already created and open up any of them you're concerned about.

With a 2nd admin account, you should be able to just move all your data to the new user account.

I did find one other area you can check, but it didn't seem to help anyone that tried it - still maybe worth a shot. If you have any plugins installed for iTunes - get rid of those. They'll be found in the root Library folder:

Library / Input Managers

However, considering you're getting low on space and if you don't have a backup for your machine, now is the time to be getting yourself an external drive and making a backup of your data.

[I already tried that, I read it on another website. It didn't work; I didn't have a Input Manager folder]

Thanks for the advice, bobtomay, for the backup...but I usually create a 'carbon copy' of my drive every month or so. I never figured a simple update of itunes would cause all that trouble. (The update worked on the new user, I tried it before copying anything.)

But yes, I created a new account; and it works. Thanks for all the help everyone, I really appreciate it.