I’ve been without Genius Mixes in my iTunes library for quite a few months now. At first the Genius Mixes page was simply blank; then, it disappeared from my source sidebar completely. It’s a known bug, and there are all sorts of suggested remedies around the web; I tried all of them, and none worked.
Last night I upgraded to iTunes 9.2 in the hopes that it would finally have the bug fixed; alas, my Genius Mixes were still missing. However, I decided to give fixing it another shot, and I was able to bring them back. What I did follows; I have no way of knowing if it was any one of these things that fixed it or the combination is required. Ensure you have a valid backup before doing this; I disclaim all responsibility if you have data loss.
- Update to iTunes 9.2, run it once to accept the license agreement and upgrade your library, then close it.
- Delete preferences file from
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.itunes.plist. - Move
~/Music/iTunes Music/iTunes Library1 to your Desktop (or any other folder). - Open iTunes; note that your library is now empty.
- Close iTunes.
- Move your original iTunes Library file from wherever you saved it back into
~/Music/iTunes Music/(you will probably have to overwrite the empty library iTunes just created). - Open iTunes. Hopefully, Genius will now begin to re-initialize itself; for me, this process took about 2 hours, after which I had my Genius Mixes back.
This has been the only way I’ve found to force iTunes to fully re-initialize Genius; both cycling Genius off and on and deleting the iTunes Library Genius database only causes the Genius data to be re-downloaded from Apple’s servers, not for your library to be re-analyzed. If you’ve been suffering from the same problem, I hope this helps.
- Depending on your settings, or if you are on Windows, this might have a file extension of
.itl. [↩]
