Problems with iTunes Genius

I recently got a 5th generation, 8gb iPod nano over the Christmas holidays, and boy is it sweet.  My last iPod was a 1st generation iPod nano, and the 5G nano is definately a huge improvement over my last iPod.

One of the cooler things about the new iPods is the Genius Mixes features.  From the Apple website, it says that Genius Mixes: “searches your iTunes library, finds songs that go great together, and creates multiple mixes you’ll love.”

And you know, it actually works quite well, at least for the first few weeks.  But as I started to add new songs to my library, Genius was not able to update itself using my new songs.   All attempts to update the Genius database would result in a cryptic error that says: “Could not complete the iTunes Store request. The store may be busy.”

Which is totally bogus, because my internet was fine, and I could access the iTunes Store with no problems.

A bit of Googling around shows that a lot of people have been experiencing the similar problems.  There are a lot of proposed fixes, such as: clearing your cookies, verifying your itunes xml library file, deleting your itdb files, etc.

These fixes have worked for some people, but it seems that a large majority of the people out there have not found a proper fix to this problem.

So we what do we know?  Well my internet is working fine so its not a networking proble, and the iTunes servers probably aren’t “busy”, since I can still access the iTunes Store. Genius updates were working properly at one point in time, but after adding some new songs, Genius would not update.

After some mucking around with some of the proposed   solutions, I finally found the source of the problem.

If you let iTunes automatically manage your music library, iTunes will secretly go behind your back and shorten the filenames of songs with names that are deemed to be too long.  Apparently, I had added a bunch of songs with very long filenames that also contain brackets (the  [  and ]  characters).

iTunes shortened those filenames in such a way that the matching right bracket was chopped off.  The unmatched brackets in the shortened filenames seemed to the be root cause of the apparent “network timeout”.

So in order to fix this, I went through all the files with unmatched brackets and removed the square brackets (thinking back on it now, a true geek would’ve written a Python script to do this for me).  Once I did that, Genius mysteriously came back to life, and all was well again .

Unusually, having unmatched parentheses casues no problem for the Genius update process.  So I guess the unmatched bracket case is one of the edge cases that the Genius programmers did not consider.

So Apple, please, if you read this,  stop using generic error messages.  That way I don’t have to pull my hair out figuring out how to fix your damn bugs.

I wonder if they have public defect tracking system, I should submit this as a bug