iTunes 12.6.1.25 and Windows 10 Creators Update – A Possible Fix

This is really here as both to potentially help others, and for me to moan about the incompatibility of the current products of two of the biggest companies in computing.

I don’t really use iTunes any longer. I don’t have a personal iPhone, and my iPod Classic is now resting in retirement. These days my music collection (yes – I own, rather than rent) is stored on Google Play Music. They let you store up to 50,000 tracks. But I retain iTunes to rip the occasional CDs I buy (Yes – this is something I still do), and as a handy offline backup of all my music. My iTunes library sits on an external hard drive.

Now because of my low usage, I hadn’t recently opened iTunes. But a newly purchased copy of Burials In Several Earths by The Radiophonic Workshop meant that I needed to rip my new CDs. In this instance I usually fire up iTunes, and then grab the digital copy to upload to Google Play Music. Nice and simple.

But iTunes really wasn’t playing fair with me. It did load slowly the first time. But it then hung. I force shut the application and tried to relaunch it – without success. New Tasks were appearing in the Windows Task Manager but iTunes wasn’t working.

Eventually, after several reboots and failed attempts, I went for the uninstall option. For the record, despite iTunes installing with a single installer, you have to uninstall six separate applications. Then I reinstalled.

Still no luck.

I did notice that if I opened as an Administrator by right hand clicking, I could open iTunes. But that wouldn’t see my library which is stored on a network attached (NAS) drive. But I had succeeded in creating a new local library. Furthermore, I wasn’t now able to change library, because I couldn’t see a way to both launch as an Administrator, while holding Shift which is necessary if you want iTunes to open a different library. (Why, after so many years, you can’t choose to open a new library inside iTunes, I don’t know.)

By now I was Googling for solutions. But of course there are thousands of people who’ve had problems with iTunes over the years. I did find some suggestions to try an older version of iTunes. One person seemed to have had success with 12.5.5.5 from January. But having uninstalled and reinstalled it didn’t work for me. Furthermore, it couldn’t even open a library from a more recent version of iTunes.

More Googling finally showed that it seems to be a problem with the recently released Windows 10 Creators’ Update. Now while this hasn’t been pushed out to most machines yet, I had recently downloaded it from Microsoft. This is, after all, the big Spring update. And they’ve already announced a second update for later in the year. It’s been through the beta channels and is theoretically ready for prime-time.

But that doesn’t seem to be true.

For me, the solution came from this page on Microsoft’s site.

You have to kill the Bluetooth Tray Application (BTTray.exe). I did this just by launching Task Manager (Ctrl – Alt – Delete > Task Manager), finding the application and closing it. I should point out that I use both a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard with my laptop. Closing this application didn’t stop them working. However if I permanently disabled the app, I’m not sure if this would help. In any case, I do like to be able to use Bluetooth.

Fortunately for me, I use the hated iTunes little enough to be able to cope with this small inconvenience. But clearly something isn’t right if the current versions of iTunes for Windows and the latest version of Windows 10 don’t work together.

I assume that it will be sorted in due course. But in the meantime, perhaps this will help someone or other.


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One response to “iTunes 12.6.1.25 and Windows 10 Creators Update – A Possible Fix”

  1. Michael avatar
    Michael

    Mediamonkey was my replacement for iTunes almost a decade ago. Never looked back.