iTunes error 5002 be gone!

Posted on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 in Technology

iTunes Ever since upgrading to the beta iTunes 9.2 I have been having an annoying problem. – Every time I click "Check for updates"1 I get an error from iTunes.

We could not complete your iTunes Store Request. An unknown error occurred (5002). There was an error in the Itunes Store. Please try again later.

When clicking "Download All Free Updates" iTunes also tells me that the information displayed is outdated, and that I should do a refresh. A second click on "Download All Free Updates" downloads all the updates. Googling reveals a few, but somewhat complicated solutions for iTunes 8, so I decides to take a look myself. My current iTunes library have existed ever since iTunes 7 and as such it has accumulated a a lot of cruft over the years. My permissions looked fine, but I had two versions of my Mobile Applications directory.

{% codeblock lang:bash %} ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications/ ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications/

I deleted the old Mobile Applications from the iTunes folder2 and the 5002 error hasn't been seen since.

Update: While the above procedure did decrease the frequency of the 5002 errors significantly, it didn't remove them completely :-(

  1. And I do that a lot as I have a mild case of compulsive refresh disorder ↩

  2. The one on line 1 – And if you do this, please remember to back it up first, just in case... ↩