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iTunes error: “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation”

March 22, 2017 By The New Guy 7 Comments

After recently wiping my MacBook Pro and reinstalling macOS, I started getting this error every time I opened iTunes: “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation.”

You do not have enough access privileges for this operation

Though the error is slightly vague, the gist of what’s happening was still pretty clear: there must be a permissions error of some sort. But finding and fixing that error was not as straight-forward as I would have hoped.

Find out what I did to fix the “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation” error in iTunes after the break.

“You do not have enough access privileges for this operation”

The error is clearly caused by a permissions issue. My first thought was to update the permissions on my ~/Music folder. (After that didn’t work, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one that had that erroneous thought.)

I tried several times to change the permissions, to no avail, even after rebooting (of course I tried turning it off and on again).

My colleague saved the day when he IM’d me this glorious terminal command:

sudo chmod -R 1777 /Users/Shared

After that, it was smooth sailing.

Hopefully if you’re having a similar “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation” error in iTunes, you will have an easier time fixing it than I did.

Filed Under: Scratch Tagged With: iTunes, macOS, terminal

Comments

  1. Mrs Kathleen Lee says

    March 30, 2017 at 12:05 pm

    thank you thank you thank you. I was just about to give in and throw apple out of the window when I found your solution. tried several others before i found you but they did not work. As soon as I used your method it worked straight away. Once again thank you so much. !!!

    Reply
  2. Paul says

    June 13, 2017 at 1:35 pm

    I have the exact same problem. Recently reinstalled Sierra OS 10.12.5 and now when I try to hook my iPhone into my MacBook Pro, I get that message.

    Question: Where, exactly, do I type in the command: sudo chmod -R 1777 /Users/Shared

    Step by step, please?

    Reply
  3. smat says

    August 10, 2017 at 6:39 pm

    Works perfectly. Thanks!

    Reply
  4. Charlotte says

    September 15, 2017 at 9:54 pm

    I’ve been sat at my laptop for three hours trying to figure out how to make it work, I wish I had come across this sooner! This worked, thank you!

    Reply
  5. K in Colorado says

    March 9, 2018 at 4:52 am

    Thank you. This is totally unintuitive. All that iTunes places there is an empty file called “SC Info.sidb” in a directory called “SC Info”. Makes no sense!!

    Reply
  6. Matt says

    May 29, 2018 at 10:05 pm

    Thanks! This really worked.

    Reply
  7. Dr. Jacqueline Stewart says

    June 20, 2018 at 6:39 pm

    Finally, a solution to this problem that the Apple genius and telephone support could not resolve. This error showed up when I installed iTunes 12.7.5.9 on my MacBook Pro running Yosemite end May 2018. I couldn’t sync my iPad Air2 to the Mac. This fixed it! Thank You!!!

    Reply

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