Tag Archives: Apple

“The iTunes Store is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later” when trying to subscribe to Podcast

Posted on by Nils
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Currently (September 2023), Apple’s iTunes store seems to have a bug where it’s impossible to subscribe to new podcasts.

However, there is a workaround.

Find your desired podcast on the iTunes store.

Click the “get” button, on the right side of the episode list, for any episode of the podcast.

Switch to your library.

The episode should show up, along with an entry for the podcast itself.

Right-click on the podcast title, and select “Subscribe Podcast”.

iTunes will not fetch the list of all available episodes, as usual.

MP3 Songs on iPhone greyed out; “This song is not currently available in your country or region” error message

Posted on by nils
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iPhone sync has always been a little wonky, but today I discovered this gem. A few audio tracks showed up on my iPhone but were greyed out; tapping them resulted in an “This song is not currently available in your country or region” error message.

What worked for me was to turn off “Sync with this iPhone over Wi-Fi” in iTunes and click the sync button. Lo and behold, the missing mp3 songs were transferred to my iPhone and I can now play them.

This happened on Windows 10, but may apply to Mac OS as well.

I’m using iTunes 12.12.2.2 and an iPhone SE (2020 model) with iOS 15.1.

iPhone: Can’t Enter Recovery Mode

Posted on by nils
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I was just trying to factory reset an old iPhone 6S, following these instructions provided by Apple. However, try as I might, the phone would just reboot.

Turns out my notebook’s USB port I was using to connect the iPhone 6S for doesn’t provide enough voltage and is thus ignored by the iPhone. I think this is so the phone doesn’t risk running out of power while updating.

The solution was to use a powered USB hub.

Mac OS X: Time Machine Backup Slow / Stuck

Posted on by nils
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I just noticed that my time machine backup (to a Synology NAS) was slow. As in… single-digit kilobytes per second, and then it got stuck completely. At first I thought this may be an issue with the Synology drive, but this turned out not to be true. In the log file of the Mac, I found a large number of these lines:

Sep 20 20:27:01 Ascalon.local mdworker[20883]: (Warning) Import: Bad path:

(Ascalon is the name of my Macbook Air.)

This seemed to be indicative of a filesystem error, but this was not the case.

It turned out that in my case the offending drive was an old Kindle I had connected to my Macbook to charge – it does mount as a USB drive, similar to a flash memory stick. Anyway, once unplugged the Time Machine backup ran as fast as always.

I should probably note that the Kindle itself is not defective – disk scans give it a clean bill of health. So I have to assume that something in its folder structure is not compatible with Time Machine. Unfortunately I never connected the Kindle to my Macbook Air before, so I can’t say if this is a general issue or a new bug of some sort.

Anyway, solution in this case: Unplug all USB drives one after the other, restart the Time Machine backup after each one to see which one offends, and then deal with that. You can use the disk check utility on your Mac, but please make sure you know what you are doing and do not accidentally erase it. (The Apple Knowledge Base is probably a good place to start.)

iPhone not recognized by iTunes – Can’t Sync

Posted on by nils
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For a while now I’ve had the issue that, sometimes, my iPhone would not be recognized by iTunes and wouldn’t sync. Sometimes there  was an error message; sometimes not. Most recently, I would just get the Windows’ sound you get when you connect a USB device twice in a row. The iPhone then charged, but did not sync at all.

Last night it got to the point where it just simply did not work at all anymore, so I had to look into it. Much to my surprise, the relevant article on the Apple Support Site, iOS: “Device not recognized in iTunes for Windows”, actually helped. In my case, I had to remove and reinstall the Apple Mobile Device USB driver.

Specifically:

Reinstall the Apple Mobile Device Driver

  1. Right-click the Apple Mobile Device entry in Device Manager and choose Uninstall from the shortcut menu.

  2. When prompted, select the box “Delete the driver software for this device” and click OK.

  3. In the resulting dialog box, click OK.

  4. In the Device Manager window, right-click Universal Serial Bus controllers and choose Scan for hardware changes from the shortcut menu.

At this point, the Apple Mobile Device entry did not reappear. Checking in the “Computer” window – the one which has your drives listed – showed an “Apple iPhone” device. I found it in the Device Manager under “Portable Devices”. I had to then update the software:

  1. Right-click the Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, or Apple iPod entry in Device Manager and choose Update Driver from the shortcut menu.

  2. Click “Browse my computer for driver software.”

  3. Click “Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer.”

  4. Click the Have Disk button. (If the Have Disk option is not present, choose a device category such as Mobile Phone or Storage Device if listed, and click next. The Have Disk button should then appear.)

  5. In the “Install from Disk” dialog, click the Browse button.

  6. Use this window to navigate to the following folder: C:Program FilesCommon FilesAppleMobile Device SupportDrivers.

  7. Double-click the “usbaapl” file. (This file will be called “usbaapl64” if you have a 64-bit version of Windows. If you don’t see “usbaapl64” here, or if there is no Drivers folder, look in C:Program Files (x86)Common FilesAppleMobile Device SupportDrivers. instead).

  8. Click OK in the “Install from Disk” dialog.

  9. Click Next and finish the driver-installation steps. Open iTunes to verify that the device is recognized properly.

This worked – as soon as I clicked “next”, the iPhone’s screen lit up and it started synchronizing.

This was on Windows 7 64bit, do check the article for other versions and more detailed descriptions.