“iTunes syncing is broken, and Apple’s not doing a good job of fixing it,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville. “There are some problems that seem well-documents, such as duplicate purchased tracks causing sync issues, and others that are too vague to find a cause.”
“What seems to happen is that some users get ‘too many open files’ errors in system.log (you can view this in the Console app), which causes syncing to fail,” McElhearn writes. “There are two solutions to this problem. The easiest is just to restart your Mac. Quitting iTunes won’t solve this issue; the usbmuxd is part of the MobileDevice framework. Restarting your Mac will clear all these connections, however.”
“No matter what; you shouldn’t have to restart your Mac to get iTunes to work,” McElhearn writes. “It’s worth noting, however, that this isn’t a new issue; if you Google “too many open files iTunes,” you’ll see people reporting this problem as far back as 2012.”
Read more in the full article here.
iCloud syncing isn’t in such great shape either. It is riddled with issues; but of course, not every user experiences every issue, and some users have no issues at all. Apple really needs to make basic iCloud functionality as trouble-free as humanly possible instead of encumbering iCloud with more and more features that only work sort of. Same for iTunes.
Or Apple could just make iCloud an optional plug-in so that users who can’t/won’t use it, don’t have to deal with it when they first set up their Macs. Forcing people to have an iCloud account is very microsoftian. The fact that iCloud is very limited and not guaranteed to be reliable or private is just unaccepable.
Wired syncing of iTunes does need to work perfectly since that should unquestionably be the fastest, most reliable, and most secure method possible to sync — but today like many iTunes functions, Apple has royally screwed up.
The fact that none of my devices sync wirelessly is driving me crazy. The fact that podcasts are broken for power users drives me insane as I listen to a lot of podcasts.