Tonight, for some reason, I couldn’t sync my iphone on my macbook pro. There were a lot of upgrades recently for me (latest itunes, finally got arround to installing 10.5.5, etc) which could have been the issue, but the error itself was wildly unhelpful.
Fortunately, on the apple support forums, someone named neil had the quick fix: itunes apparently barfs if ANY file it wants to look at is locked (an old apple-ism that should be removed from the filesystem, post haste).
Anyway, the fix is a snap. Open the Script Editor in the /Applications/AppleScript/ folder and run the following:
tell application "Finder" set locked of every item of entire contents of folder "Music:iTunes" of home to false end tell |
Once that’s pasted in, click the run button. If you still have troubles syncing, replace the Music:iTunes path with Music, and perhaps also Photos.
The original thread on the apple support forums is here.