Inspired by I-57

Perhaps I am the only person that this applies to, but in case not:

I store all my music, mp3s and m4us, on a network share. We do this because my wife and I share an iTunes account, the server’s backed up, etc, etc. Now we both can get to our tunes.

For some reason, though, my mac will eventually time out the SMB share to my fileserver. When iTunes starts up, it will look for the music in my library, and it won’t be there, and 99.5% of my music is unavailable, and iTunes puts an exclamation mark next to it.

I used to man up, mount the share, and tell iTunes to play every song on the share. Apparently, this is not required, and the solution is obvious–

Quit iTunes. Mount share. Start iTunes. All your music is “back”.

I’m a doofus for not thinking of that.

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.