iTunes Store Not Updating? How to Reset the iTunes & App Store Cache

Oct 11, 2013 - 1 Comment

The iTunes Store updates frequently to display new apps, music, movies, TV shows, and the free app of the week, and typically you can see the new stuff by just clicking around in iTunes to visit the various stores and media content areas. But sometimes the iTunes Store may display stale content, particularly if the iTunes app has been left running for a long time to listen to music or Radio. If you find the Store is not updating itself, the first thing you should do is try refreshing the iTunes Store by hitting Command+R (control+r if you’re on Windows) to force reload. That may resolve the not updating issue for some situations, but in more stubborn cases you may need to perform a full fledged cache dump.

Refresh iTunes Store and App Store caches

Thankfully iTunes makes clearing out iTunes and App Store caches very easy, so rather than digging around in user caches yourself, you can use an overlooked feature built directly into iTunes that lets you dump the cache and start all over again.

  • Open iTunes and go to “Preferences”, found from the iTunes menu
  • Choose the “Advanced” tab, look for “Reset iTunes Store cache” and choose “Reset cache”

Reset iTunes Store caches

There is no confirmation, but all caches instantly delete themselves which will force the iTunes app to pull in fresh data from Apple’s servers. This is a lot like clearing the cache in a web browser, and both the iTunes and App Stores use http and HTML to serve and display data which makes it even more similar in action (for the technically curious, you can enter into a hidden debug mode and explore).

This applies to both the iTunes Store for media and the iTunes-based App Store for iOS devices, and returning to either after the cache has been cleared will display the new store content and updates again.

You may find this necessary to perform if you have relocated the iTunes Library to another drive recently, and we’ve had several reports of stale store data carrying along with the library, despite it not actually containing all of the same caches.

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Posted by: Paul Horowitz in iTunes, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting

One Comment

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  1. Ken Ogston says:

    Why can I no longer log into my I tune on my Mac any more?

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