iTunes and Large Libraries: Still Slow, Slow, Slow
I have a lot of music: my iTunes library currently contains about 40,000 tracks. I buy a lot of CDs, buy music from the iTunes Store, listen to audiobooks, and download podcasts. This library increases in size as I rip more music, and it has gotten to the point where performance is very, very poor.
I have a Mac Pro (with four cores) that has 4 GB RAM and plenty of hard disk space, so I’m clearly near the high end of potential performance. But as iTunes has progressed, it has not improved its performance; whenever I make any changes in my library (change tags, add tracks, download podcasts), it takes about 5 seconds for the program to become responsive. I get a spinning beach-ball and the program simply pauses (though, to be fair, in most cases it continues playing music if I’m listening to something with iTunes).
I first saw performance problems when ripping CDs, a bit more than a year ago when I bought my Mac Pro. I had hoped it would be faster than my previous computer, a G5 iMac, but it was only marginally more rapid. So I bought a second optical drive: a 52x CD-only drive (the Mac Pro has a superdrive which reads CDs slower than that). This improved ripping speeds a bit, but I finally got fast rips when I created a second iTunes library just for ripping – this proves that the problem is the library size, not the program itself, my optical drive, or my Mac. I can get up to 40x rips now, at the ends of CDs, compared to a max of around 22x with the superdrive.
My iTunes Library file is large: 68 MB. My guess is that iTunes, when working with a file this size, has to write the file anew each time there is a change, and that this is what slows down the program. I see 5-second delays when I simply download a podcast (at the end of the download, when, I assume, the file’s information is written to the library file), or when I uncheck tracks from smart playlists that contain only checked tracks. Any operation that leads to changes in the library file seem to cause the program to hang for five seconds.
I don’t see any solution, other than Apple improving the performance of iTunes and its library files. As people use iTunes more, they are likely to increase the number of tracks they have, and their performance will degrade, so more users will be seeing these problems, especially with slower computers.
At each release of an iTunes update, I hope that Apple will resolve this problem. Alas, after yet another update today (7.7.1) it seems to be even worse when ripping CDs.
UPDATE: When Apple release iTunes 8, responsiveness improved greatly, but there are still lags when tagging files and when importing. It is better, but it’s still far from perfect.
What about you, readers? How is your iTunes performance? How big is your library? Add your thoughts to the comments below.
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You bring up an interesting point. Do you think your problems are due
strictly to the number of tracks, or is it the physical size of the collection? In
other words, would a collection of 40,000 tracks ripped in 192K AAC have
as many issues as the same collection ripped in Apple Lossless or AIFF? I’ve
recently started going all digital and have ripped most of my CD collection
into iTunes. Currently I have about 15000 tracks – all from 192K – 320K
AAC – on one library on an external drive. While I’m not currently
experiencing any unacceptable delays or hangs, I suppose it’s likely I will in
the future. My next move was going to be adding the 300 or so Grateful
Dead shows I’ve got (on about 800 CDs). Perhaps I should create a separate
library for those, or consider ripping them at a lower bit rate as they’re not
CD quality to begin with. Either way, thanks…you’ve given me something to
think about.
I’m certain that it’s the number of tracks, not their size. This is
because the
library files increase in size as the number of items in the library increase.
This said, it is
also the number of playlists you have. I used to have a playlist that contained
all my
checked songs, and another that contained all my unchecked songs (each
was about half
my library). When I removed those two playlists, my library shrank by more
than 5 MB. So
if you have a lot of playlists, and if you don’t use them, try culling them. What
I’ve done is
change some smart playlists that contain music by composer or performer to
only contain
25 tracks selected at random, rather than all of them. For example, my 3600
tracks of
Schubert lieder were culled to just 25 tracks, saving a lot of space in the
library file.
Go ahead and add all your Dead shows – having that music to listen is far
more important
than a slightly slower iTunes. :-)
Kirk
I very much agree. I also have a large library that suffers from performance
issues. Another thing that seems to contribute to the performance woes are
smart playlists. I have created close to 600 playlists (mostly smart playlists
that group similar artists/albums/etc. and what I have rated as their better
songs), many of which contain more than a 1000 tracks. Changing the rating
or modifying the genre of a single track will bring up the spinning beachball
for more than a minute. I’ve confirmed it’s mostly related to the smart
playlists by copying the library, and then deleting most of the rating based
playlists at which point performance will vastly improve. … Fortunately I
mostly listen to my music via my SlimDevices Squeezeboxes so I don’t have
to live with the iTunes beachballs much.
Each track in a playlist adds an entry in your library, so lots of playlists – either
smart or dumb – increase its size.
Kirk
See my comments on iTunes here: Big, Bad iTunes
Your problems are more to do with the fact that you’re using an NAS than
iTunes itself. Taking 15 min to an hour to add files has nothing to do with
iTunes – if I drag a folder of music files on iTunes, it starts adding them right
away. It takes time to copy the files to the new location in my iTunes Music
file, but that’s normal. I think you’re exaggerating. Check your network setup
to find out how to get better speed – you mention gigabet ethernet, but that
means nothing; your NAS is accessed by AirPort, so it depends on which
speed 802.11 you’re using.
Frankly, you’re being unfair, criticizing something because of slowness that
has more to do with your setup than the program itself. I’m criticizing
slowness inherent in the program; you’re blaming your network lag on
iTunes.
Kirk
Hi Kirk,
I think you misunderstand my use of the AirPort Express – I’m only using it as an endpoint for digital audio. The wireless capabilities are disabled. It’s wired via a gig-e connection.
Same goes for my Mac Mini (gig-e wired connection to NAS). I mentioned in the article that dropping a folder of music into iTunes can take an hour or more to add them to the library when doing this over wireless to my laptop, but the same is true over the gig-e connection to the Mac Mini. I’ve measured the raw transfer speed to/from the NAS, and it’s reasonably good — nothing that would account for iTunes’ glacial performance.
My guess as to the performance problems is that it may be rewriting the rather large iTunes Library file for every track scanned — I haven’t confirmed that though. All I can say is that Apple appears to be doing something pretty dumb in an inner loop.
wh
Gotcha.
Try changing the library location to your hard disk and see if the folder gets
written faster; if so, it’s something with your network connection. I’ve never used
iTunes with a networked volume for the music, so I don’t know if that could be
a problem, but your delays are far longer than what I’ve heard about elsewhere.
Kirk
So my library file is just over 52 MB. I’m running a G4 snazzed up to 1.2 Ghz. Since I upgraded to 7.6 I can’t do squat. All my music is on an external firewire drive, and I’m thinking I need to go back to 7.5. Whenever I click on anything in iTunes I get the beach ball for anywhere from five seconds to five minutes (no exaggeration). I asked in the discussions for help in downgrading, but have not gotten a reply in a couple of days.
But, I did see something new just now. Apple seems to have finally noticed the large library problem. Check this out:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6477381#6477381
Kirk, could you possibly give me advice on how to revert back to 7.5?
Thanks,
Shawn
Remove the current version, and download 7.5 here:
http://www.oldapps.com/download_iTunes_mac.php
Kirk
I simply trash the application, install 7.5, then point to my external drive’s library directory? I don’t need to delete any log files or anything other than the application itself?
Thanks for writing about this, Kirk. I have asked many friends about their experiences with iTunes, but none of them have the large music library I do.
I run an internet radio station and receive an average of 200 new CDs each month, so my library is large and growing.
My library contains 61,658 songs as of this writing. I can’t tell how many playlists because they are organized into folders, but it’s definitely in the hundreds. The Library file is 136.8MB and the Library.xml file is 130.2MB.
The Mac I use is a MDD Dual 867 with 2GB RAM. It’s a bit long in the tooth but still a fine machine for most of the things I need it to do.
iTunes has been slow for me since my library crossed the 25,000-song threshold. Since then I too have experienced long lag times while trying to rename or otherwise edit song information. To be honest, for the past 2 years I’ve been waiting for iTunes to stop working entirely, and am impressed that it still works despite my the size of my library.
That said, with the "upgrade" to iTunes 7.6, it would appear my iTunes is finally in it’s last throes. When I launch it, even if nothing else is running, it stays in "Not Responding" spinning beach ball of death mode for about 10 minutes before I can actually work with it. This makes me sad.
I wonder if Apple is working on an iTunes Pro application for those of us with large libraries. While it would be nice if it was free, or bundled with iLife, if it could handle my library smoothly I’d buy it on it’s own.
As was stated in an earlier comment, users’ music/media libraries are going to continue to grow. While the large libraries described here are not the norm, certainly more and more people will run into these performance issues in the coming months and years as their personal media libraries grow.
Let’s hope Apple is working on this.
Ted
I don’t know if they’re working on a pro version, but I think they simply need to
improve this version, because more and more of us have lots of music.
FWIW, I got so frustrated that I filed a bug report with Apple, and have been
contacted twice by Apple engineers for more information, so I think they are
taking this seriously. I’m simply afraid that they weren’t aware of this, that they
hadn’t tested the program with libraries as big as some of us have. Go figure…
Kirk
Well, my library is not anywhere as big as yours, but I get similar problems.
I have a 2.33GHz MacBook Pro with 3GB RAM and about 8000 tracks in my
iTunes library. Still, since 7.6 things have grind down to a halt. I watch a
video news podcast where each piece of news is in its own episode. With 7.5 I
could watch the episodes one after another without any problem. Now in 7.6
iTunes seems to need 5-10 sec to register the episode as played which halts
the video. Also, it doesn’t register the track straight after you finish playing it,
but rather in 10-15 sec. Which means that I have to wait up to 25 sec
between news pieces, some of which are even shorter than that.
What I’ve noticed is that during startup iTunes 7.6 loads its library in an
obviously inefficient structure in memory, so that on my machine it starts up
with at least 700MB. There seems to a memory leak somewhere as well,
because the used memory can grow beyond 1.5GB – and that’s for 8000
tracks. I can imagine the results for 70k tracks.
So thanks for the link for iTunes 7.5 – I’ll be installing that next and hopefully
7.6.1 will come out soon to fix the memory issues.
Ventzi
Quite to my amazement, 7.6.1 doesn’t solve the outstanding performance
issues.
I had the same problem. I am running 7.6.2 with over 13k songs which takes up about 75 gigs. All of a sudden iTunes got terribly slow. Checking the Activity Monitor, I was getting over 100% while doing basic tasks changing songs, adding music or getting info. I verified it wasn’t a smart playlist (by deleting them all) and made sure no podcasts were downloading.
I finally fixed the problem by rebuilding the iTunes library. See instructions at apple: How to re-create your library.
Now it runs just as fast as it ever has. Hope this helps.
I tried that, and it didn’t help me.
Kirk
105gb sitting on an external USB 2 drive. 95% Apple lossless AAC; 7k > songs,
and iTunes 7.7.1 running on a first gen, Leopard OS X, CoreDuo 2ghz iMac 2gb
RAM. No delays, perfectly good response times to alterations of metadata etc,
The only thing slightly different is I ensure all drives are thoroughly
defragmented using iDefrag.
It’s because you only have 7K songs. It’s not the size of the music files that
counts, it’s the size of your library file. Check and see how big it is; mine is
currently 71MB.
Ripping CDs yesterday, I time some stuff. There are two 8-second lags when
ripping tracks. The first one second after the track starts importing, and the
second at the end. If every time something gets changed there’s an 8-second
lag (and this is on a quad-core Mac Pro) then obviously it’s going to be slow.
Ah, so much of this is familiar to me. I’m running iTunes 7.7.1 with 45000 tracks on a Mac mini. This is the only thing running on the mini. The bottleneck with iTunes performance is invariably the CPU. The iTunes process repeatedly rises to 100% and stays there during many application operations.
My library database is about 135mb, and I believe the size is contingent on Playlists and other data, such as Comments, which are stored in the database (this info per Apple), not in the music files themselves. I use Comments as a place to identify song styles, which a few hundred of my playlists use to categorize my music. I can modify a single track’s Comment and wait approximately 4 – 5 minutes for the job to complete.
Some bottom up iTunes changes are going to be necessary. But I’d love to continue this discussion with other users so we can help each other maximize performance of iTunes the way it exists today. Feel free to get in touch.
jasonwoerner@gmail.com
I don’t think the bottleneck is actually the CPU. You see the CPU working, it’s
true, but I think the bottleneck is the program needing to write the library file
each time a change is made. On a Mac mini, you have a slower CPU than, say,
my Mac Pro, so it’s going to take a bit longer, but you also have a much
bigger library file. Remember that adding comments to a file also involves
their being written to the file itself, not to the library, so that slowdown
sounds more like the hard disk being the cause. I think the Mac mini has only
a 4200 RPM hard disk, so that’s another factor.
You can prove that the comments are stored in music files by adding
comments to a file, removing it from your iTunes
library, than adding it back. The comments will still be attached to the file.
They may also, however, be in the library file.
So it could still be writing that file again as you add comments. But I don’t
see that adding comments should take any
longer than other operations – does it?
I believe the bottleneck is the CPU because I watch it hover at 100% during the operations that take the longest. Once the CPU isn’t utilizing 100% of the CPU, iTunes becomes responsive again.
Regarding where the Comments field lives: here’s a relevant section from Apple’s support doc describing the library file (emphasis mine). The URL is http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660:
"This file is a database of the songs in your library and the playlists you’ve created. Some song-specific data is saved in this file. If you delete the file, iTunes creates a new, empty copy when you open the application, but any playlists, song ratings, *comments*, or other information you created is lost. The iTunes Library file is only used by iTunes."
I can edit track name, number, year, album artist, genre, grouping, etc. for a group of songs and watch the progress bar flit through each file in a second or so. But, if I edit the Comments field for the same group of files the progress exhibits the CPU issue I’ve described and each file takes a few minutes to change. Please repeat the experiment, I’d love to hear your results.
JDubs
It takes me no longer to edit comments than anything else. In fact, it might be a
bit quicker than other tags…
And you can see that the comments are stored in the file; just open one in a
different library, or even open a music file in a text editor and search for any
comments you’ve entered. The library may store a _copy_ of your comments,
but that info is stored with the file itself, as all tags are.
I’m surprised (and excited) to hear that you don’t experience the bottleneck for comments specifically.
Here’s another possibility: I have a few hundred smart playlists that are generated depending on text located in the Comments field. I can imagine that when a song’s Comment field is modified, each of those Smart Playlists is recalculated, and perhaps the iTunes Library file is rebuilt. Can anyone shed some light?
Jason
I’ve found that large artwork files can slow iTunes down. Hiding the artwork
pane can speed things up, for different thing depending on whether you have it
set to show art for the currently playing track or for the selected track.
Naturally, coverflow will slow you down too for the same reasons.
I don’t use coverflow.
I just tried hiding the artwork pane; it makes no difference in the time to check
or uncheck a track; I still get the beachball when I do that.
Have you tried running Instruments or Activity Monitor’s sample process to get
some clues as to what’s slowing it down?
I’ve used Activity Monitor, but I don’t think I’ve often dug in with the sample process feature you mention. I’ll give it a shot. I’ll also take a look at Instruments.
My issue with iTunes is almost definitely CPU-related. And it’s caused by iTunes activity. But the mystery remains what iTunes is trying to do and why it has to race the processor to do so.
Jason
I have a library of over 63,000 songs, running on an internal drive on a dual
2GHz PowerMac G5 with 4GB of RAM and I experience exactly the same
problems you’ve described. It is definitely the library file size, which as you’ve
said is directly dependent solely on the number of tracks (and to an extent
playlists) you have, as I have had this problem since well before I had even
30,000 tracks on there.
I haven’t found a solution yet that works for me. I tried splitting the library
and using one of those library switching utilities, but that was hassle and
meant I had to remember which library I’d added things to to and so on.
Altering ID3 tags is the most infuriating part of it – it takes 5-6 seconds just
to change the name of one track. It strikes me that Apple really ought to
update the system with a decent database back-end that wouldn’t require
iTunes to write the entire library file out to disk every time you make a
change (which is, as far as I can tell, what is happening). MySQL or another
free DBMS could easily be used to store the library, and then making changes
to metadata would take no time at all.
I’m really hoping they do something to address this in iTunes 8.0–I just batch changed a mere 90 files (in a 40K+ library) and the operation took over five minutes to complete, with one CPU core pegged the entire time.
Yes, in fact, yesterday I spent some time culling my library and changing tags.
Took me about the same time. I removed about 9000 tracks, though, and my
library file went from 72 to 65 MB. Things seem just a tad less slow. But, yea, I’m
really hoping the next iteration of iTunes will do something about this problem.
I’m a little late in entering this forum, but I’ve been struggling with the same
problem as y’all for months, and somehow tonight’s Google search landed me
here. I don’t have too much new to add, except that my lag time (usually
about 35 seconds per operation) occurs when changing info like the artist
name, composer, album. I have minimal delay with the fields designed for
user input, like genre, ratings, grouping, etc.
Since I, like others on this forum, use iTunes as a music organizing tool and
database, this gets to be a real drag if I’m trying to update my library. Well, I’ll
keep looking for a solution, as we all appear to be, and will post anything
interesting back here if successful.
(I have a MacPro Quad-Core Intel with 8 GB RAM and keep my iTunes library
on a 3 TB G-Speed fiber-channel RAID by G-Tech. The library itself is almost
all Apple Lossless except for some hi-res stuff, and has about 55,000 songs
taking up 1.3 TB of space)
By the way, Kirk, sorry to hear about your MacPro spewing toxic fumes! I’ll
keep posted to see what that was all about (I’m a physician when I’m not
playing music on the Mac).
Hey, how about our man, Obama!!
Regarding the library size: you’re on the high end there with 55,000 tracks.
As I wrote, my response
time got better with iTunes 8, though I still get delays when adding tracks
(but they’re shorter). The
location of the files doesn’t make a difference – in your case on a fiber-
channel RAID disk set – it’s the
location of the library file that is written. But do post if anything improves. I’ll
also update the article if
there are any changes.
Re the toxic Mac Pro: it took about two weeks to flush the odor from my
office. I bought an air
filter/purifier at the end, and ran it for several days, and was able to return to
my office. It has now
passed, but it was clearly an allergic reaction to something.
Re Obama: Yes we did! ;-)
Kirk
It has been interesting reading this thread, I started using iTunes when the first 3rd generation iPods came out, that must be 4/5 years ago now.
Initially I thought iTunes was great for its simplicity in design and the ease with which you could find/ organise songs, create CDs. But once my library got to any size iTunes just struggled. Today is no different – you can’t expect someone on a Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM to be waiting seconds for the application to respond.
Let’s get one thing straight here, no application has any excuse for taking seconds to add a file or change the tag information in a library.
Apple software devs have for some insane? reason not switched the library database from XML to another data structure. XML is not in any way the correct method of storing large amounts of information. The main arguments: 1. Filesize: XML adds a lot of unnecessary metadata (at least for a db) 2. Loading/ Saving: The whole file needs to be read into memory or saved to disk as there is no random access in XML
When you have to read/write 60MB, 100MB or 160MB to disk for a 20byte edit (say a track title change, [20 characters]), this is insane! Don’t blame your computer, don’t try to recreate your library umpteen times, don’t blame the UBS disk or the NAS, and don’t reason that this is a difficult problem for Apple to solve (and tell people not to criticize iTunes too much) – the answer is basic computer science, use an efficient data structure.
I can’t understand why they don’t just store the library a proper database, look at other applications which do this well, MediaMonkey sticks out in my mind, but also WMP doesn’t have such problems with the library (if my memory is correct).
I like iTunes but the love is lost when it becomes unusable.
The library file is _not_ XML; the XML file is a secondary file that’s created from
the library file for use with other applications. This said, it could be that having
to write _two_ files slows things up.
One other thing: I wonder if the library file itself isn’t compressed, because
when you look at it with a text editor, there’s no normal text inside it. Again,
that could slow things up a bit.
Ok I’m corrected on that one Kirk :)
I wonder how often the XML is kept up to date, every change to library or less often etc… Must have a propper look at how its working myself, once I get my old PC with mp3 collection up & running again.
I just did a test, and they’re both updated at the same time. That could be part
of the slowdown, in fact…
My library hit the brakes hard and is very slow to accept changes…Not sure
what happened, but when I added some music yesterday, making changes
became a real grind. I think the library went from 32k to 32.2k in items.
After reading this, dropping some smart (but not smart enough) playlists
along with some other stuff, I noticed that iTunes repeatedly writes a file in
the itunes folder. The result of my actions was a 2M reduction in the iTunes
file size so I stopped. In my case, the file that is being written routinely is a
1M file. I’m not smart enough to know what this is but maybe you do….
My library file….73M
The XML file….66.2
iTunes writes a temp file, but that’s deleted after the library and XML files are
written. Are you saying that file remains? What’s the file called?
sorry….forgot to check in yesterday…..
The files pop up and then are removed.
since posting, I also repaired permissions….there were a couple that needed
work, but nothing clearly itunes.
Either way, working any track data lately is not as slow as it was.
My iTunes library file is very big, and I’ve experienced the same agonizing beachball spinning episodes. I don’t really want any "smart" functions in iTunes. Just smooth playback.
I actually never copy files to the library, I just add them. I prefer organizing my folders myself. For example, I don’t want a thousand tracks in one "Compilations" folder, I’d rather have a folder for each album.
I have long stopped using iTunes to tag files. I use MediaRage to check and amend all tags, add album cover artwork etc. Only when I know all is good with the new files I drag them into iTunes to add them to my library. I still have some wait time when I browse through my collection during playback, but at least this way I don’t have to wait 2 minutes between tagging each track.
Hope this suggestion helps. … and hoping even more for a better "no frills" iTunes soon!
I’m just guessing here, but it may be that "organizing your folders yourself" –
which seems to be an obsession with Windows users carried over from MP3
players where you manually add files and folders – could slow down iTunes. It
means that the program has to look in a number of different locations to find
files.
Again, it’s just a guess, but it would be worth testing someday…
I somehow doubt not copying the individual files to the iTunes library contributes to the slowness. It seems to be the library file writing process that produces the beach ball spinning.
I never use Genius, smart playlists, I never rate my music, nor do I want to know how often I’ve played each track, etc. So it pains me to think that all this keeping track of statistics in iTunes is to no use to me, but it does slow down the program. This is where I wish for a "no-frills" iTunes
I’ve never used Windows, but when I used iTunes the first time I was horrified at the idea of the program "taking over" … putting the files in my user folder, re-organizing subfolders etc. It seemed like the right thing to do for all the newbies with iMacs who just want the machine do all the organizing. To me it was weird, especially the idea having one "Compilations" folder with thousands of tracks. For any individual back-up plans, that’s not so ideal….
Also, my library wouldn’t fit on a single internal HD anyway, at least I have it all on a couple of internal HDs.
Do other people have similar problems/concerns with their itunes collection?
First, it _is_ the library file writing that is the problem. But whenever you copy
a file to your library, the library file gets re-written. The only other solution
would be to have the program parse the disk to see what’s where; that would
be much slower.
As for the organization points you make, I still don’t see the problem. First,
the Compilations folder still has compilations organized by album; it doesn’t
just toss the tracks there. The iTunes Music folder (which doesn’t have to be
in your user folder; I have a hard disk dedicated for my music) keeps things
organized perfectly, by artist and album, so if you ever want to back up files
by sorting them (though, again, I only back up my entire disk) you can.
iTunes lets you keep your music where you want; you can have it not
organize folders for you, but then you’d put the music where you want and
add it to your iTunes library; iTunes doesn’t move it, it just notes the location.
But it’s a computer – don’t you want it doing things for you? Do you worry
about your e-mail program organizing your e-mail? Or do you spend time
moving your messages around and expect your e-mail program to follow?
Fully agree and share your experience. Mac Pro 8 core 3,2GHz 10GB and still
very slow response to changes. 90MB library re-writen each time something
new. iTunes 8 further deteriorates the situation. I use the same trick (open
empty iTunes to work fast whenever I have to do heavy work). It’s a shame
Apple does NOTHING for their best customers.
Since the response time is very short with small libraries, why Apple would not
use some kind of "differential update" of the Library file (like any iPod sync or,
iPhone sync, or like SmartUpdate with SuperDuper …). That could considerably
shorten the "write" time when needed, rather to re-write it entirely ???
Hope someone from Apple iTunes development read all those complaints
sometimes … and does some smart development of iTunes …
I don’t know the logic behind the way they write the library. There must be
something to do with preventing the database from getting corrupted or out of
sync. But since you can’t really perform more than one operation at a time, I’m
not sure why. Frankly, I have a feeling that it’s just not designed for large
libraries, and that they’d have a lot of work to ensure better performance. I’ve
written about this for Macworld several times, so Apple is certainly aware of the
issues.
It seems that the latest iTunes update 8.1.1 has addressed this issue. I do see a much better performance now. Still the beachball will show up once in a while, but at least not ALL the times.
I just got a new MacPro and am considering setting up a striped RAID array with three 1TB HDs (with CCC backup and the OS & apps on a separate HD) for work files and mp3s.
I somehow expect a better disk read/write for my iTunes media files from this …
Anyone has experience with this setup?
I don’t think the RAID would make much of a difference; the read/write speed doesn’t seem to be what slows down iTunes, but rather the writing of its library files. But it is much, much faster now.
Thank God, I am not the only person who has suffered this problem.
I upgraded my computer thinking it was old and slow.
All along, the size of my iTunes library was the cause.
(I some suspected this when using my almost empty iTunes on my G3 laptop which ran faster than my Leopard running desktop.)
I look forward to Apple’s or some one’s work-around to this bugging problem.
If you are using FOLDERS in iTunes to organize your Playlist, get rid of them, the Folders, that is, that might solve your issue. I have over 45K songs, 246GB along with nearly 600GB of movies and TV Shows and iTunes is brisk on a lowly G5 iSight iMac. One other thing, ALWAYS use a Firewire Drive, there is a drastic difference between Firewire and USB, not sure why but there is. Good Luck
It is nice to find other people with large itunes collections. When calling Apple, I have been unable to find a tech who has any experience with large libraries. Anyways, I have recently been having issues with slowness in importing already ripped cds to my library (I use a separate program to rip) I can deal with the slowness but if I click on the itunes window by accident, or scroll within the window iTunes and OS X often crash. I am using iTunes 9.01 with 64k songs and 89MB library file running on a 3ghz imac with 4gb ram. Plenty of free hard drive space and both ram and hard drive test ok. Apple keeps telling me it must be hardware or a software corruption issue–that library size should not affect iTunes performance. I love iTunes and have been using it happily for years but does anyone know of music manager for the mac that handles the database more efficiently?
I don’t think any program works better than iTunes with large libraries. At least I’ve never heard of any, including the many Windows programs that handle music.
Kirk, how big is your library now? Have you experienced any changes with iTunes 9?
About 46K tracks, currently. No, iTunes 9 didn’t change anything for me.
Turns out my problem was software related. I finally broke down and did an erase and install of the OS and now everything is working well. Go figure (I had previously recreated the library from the xml file, downgraded from 10.6, archive installed the OS all to no avail.)
Anyways, if it is any use to those of you still having difficulties, I have a large library (90MB, 63,000 songs, 405GB) and it is now running relatively well. Beachballing for less than 10 seconds when adding new albums. pausing for less than 5 seconds when editing tags.
I’m up to 75,000+ songs and it’s crashing again. running any resource intensive applications while adding music to library can crash the whole OS, requiring a restart. I’m running Snow Leopard with iTunes 9.2 on a 3ghz imac with 4gb ram. Editing tags does not cause crashing and is still pretty quick.
Just a guess, but have you checked for disk problems? A crash when adding files makes me think it’s something to do with writing the files.
According to disk utility and drive genius, the disk is good. These are the only write oriented crashes I experience (I think) and the memory passes testing as well. I watch a lot of movies from my hard drive so I am constantly writing and deleting large files. Those writes do not cause hanging or crashing.
I’ve run into this problem as well. I’ve got about 40,500 tracks and album art for all 3,000 albums. While it was still slow prior to adding album art about six months ago, I noticed that having the album art significantly slowed down loading and scrolling, which is understandable. With the newer graphical iPods and the iPhone/iPad instead of the older generations of text-based interfaces, though, it’s really nice to have album art….
Hi all, glad to see that this problem has not only hit the Windoze users. I have a library sitting at 69589 songs at this moment in time, running 7.7.1, but apart from the slowness, I (and a friend with a similar size library running 9.1.1) have found iTunes to loose some tracks now and then.
We suspect that it has to do with iTunes struggling with the large library files.
One thing that I have noticed though is that if for some reason a track is missing in the iTunes library (the ‘!’ shows next to the track), this tends to slow iTunes down. I did this exercise a while back and went hunting for missing tracks on the HHD. The more I found and relocated, the quicker iTunes became.
Just a thought on my 2¢ worth of info, hope this shed some light.