"Determining Gapless Playback Information" Freezes iTunes

Hardware and technical stuff
1

So I just packed my main desktop computer (and host to my large iTunes library) into a cargo container to meet me on the other side of the Atlantic in a few months. In the meantime, I’m doing all of my work on a MacBook Air with a paltry 64GB SSD, so I decided to offload my iTunes library onto an external hard drive by exporting the library.xml file and then copying the iTunes media folder over to the USB hard drive.

So far so good. On the Air, I then reimported the library.xml file into a fresh install of iTunes. Here’s where my problems began: the library.xml file never finished importing no matter how long I waited, so I finally clicked “stop” and was surprised to see all of my library now sitting within iTunes anyway.

Whew, but then the next freeze came: upon trying to “determine gapless playback,” iTunes locks up and freezes every single time, forcing me to force quit.

Does anyone have any ideas?

2

Are the paths in your library.XML correct?

3

I would think so. Before I exported the Library.xml, I copied the entire iTunes media folder to the USB hard drive, then went into iTunes and changed the location of the media library to the USB HDD, then allowed it to update accordingly. Opening Library.xml, I see what I believe is the correct folder being consistently referenced, too, although obviously, I haven’t check it line by line.

4

But is it correct for the old PC or for the MBA? How much music are we talking about anyway?

5

It should be correct for both, because both the MacBook Air and the iMac have been set to reference the Bird Drive for the iTunes Media Library.

Datawise, we’re talking 55.39GB of music, 20GB of movies, 7GB of podcasts, 479MB of books, and 6GB of apps. Largish, but manageable.

6

Unless you’ve got lovingly crafted playlists, I’d remove everything from the library, delete the imported XML, re-import all the music from and let it rebuild the XML file from scratch.

7

Or try dropping the iTunes plist if you haven’t yet.

8

The only problem with this, and why I haven’t done it already, is basically because that’ll require me to resync my iPod and iPhone from scratch… which means all the apps will be deleted, and I’ll have to fucking re-download all of them. A huge pain in the ass, especially considering Apple doesn’t offer an easy way to do this, or even a consolidated panel of all the apps you own.

9

You should be able to backup your iPhone configuration to your computer from within iTunes and then restore your apps and settings from there. When I migrated everything from an iPod Touch to an iPhone last year it was completely painless.

10

MarchHare, on the same computer? This is a new computer we’re talking about.

11

I used the same computer to clone my iPod Touch’s settings and apps to my iPhone, but I think you can backup and restore any connected device to any computer.

This link should have more info about what you’re looking for: