iTunes 8.1 and Large Libraries: More Progress on the Speed Front
In the past, I’ve written about how slow iTunes was with a large library, and then how iTunes improved its speed. But that improvement was still not enough. For those of us with lots of music, there were still lags when changing tags: some people reported 30-second lags when tagging an album.
Well, Apple has release iTunes 8.1, and they seem to have gotten the better of these speed problems. On launch, the program loads my library much faster, and when tagging tracks, it is much, much faster than before. Here’s an example: a 714-track collection of lieder by Franz Schubert took about 20 seconds to record a change of genre; before, that would have taken several minutes. I could tell by the progress bar that something had changed, because it was no longer jerky, and I could tell by my CPU usage – I have a menu extra in my menu bar that shows processor usage – that this was considerably lower. In the past, CPU usage would spike, for one CPU, and keep spiking over and over, shifting CPUs (I have four). Now, CPU usage is minimal, and stays that way throughout the process. Adding art to an album now takes a few seconds, compare with 20-30 seconds before.
Ripping a CD is faster too; iTunes is able to rip at higher speeds – over 25x at the beginning of a disc, and over 35x at the end (with a 52x CD-only drive) – though there is still a noticeable lag with a CPU spike as it processes the track and moves ahead to the next one, then a short delay at the beginning of new tracks. This is quite an improvement: generally, when ripping from my large library, I’d get around 20x throughout, with lots of time between tracks. (I haven’t tested this on my empty ripping library, which, at this speed, I may no longer use, except for very large boxes.) Converting existing compressed tracks to another compressed format (320 kbps MP3 to 160 kbps AAC) doesn’t seem much faster, going around 20x, but you have to remember that this involves both uncompressing the originals to lossless before compressing them again in the new format. Converting AIIF files – uncompressed files, which are the same as on CDs – occurs at about the same speed as CDs, from 25x to around 35x on long tracks, still with lags at the beginnings and ends of tracks. This is still much slower than XLD, or X Lossless Decoder, which can do four tracks at a time at around 30x each.
So Apple has made some progress on the speed front. As for tagging, I doubt they could make it much faster. They could probably make improvements in ripping and converting, though, which seem to have lags and CPU spikes. But at least the basic managing tasks are much faster, for those of us with large libraries.
One final note: my library file is noticeably smaller, from 73 MB under iTunes 8.0 to a mere 10.3 MB under 8.1. It seems that Apple must have either decided to put less information in the library file or compress it. This suggests that the speed improvements depend essentially on the size of the library file, as opposed to any internal improvements in the way iTunes functions.
What about you? If you have a large library, and you’ve been following these articles, chime in in the comments with your results.
Posted: 3/12/2009 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | 13 Comments »
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Definitely seems faster to me. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time. My lib went from 120MB to 20MB.
This is unbelievable! Yesterday I selected about 2500 tracks (everything I have) and chose to remember playback position on all of them. Most of them already had it set, but finding the ones that don’t is impossible. (Actually it is possible with AppleScript, but very slow. Much faster to just set them all if I want them all to be the same.) The whole thing took about five minutes. Today, in iTunes 8.1, I selected all of those tracks and set remember playback position to no for all of them just to test, and it set them all instantly. There was no progress bar, only a watch cursor for an instant, and You Control Tunes immediately recognized that the playing track had changed and showed the banner for it again. Changing them all back took the same time.
My guess is the iTunes is just smarter, changing things in the background. It is also smart enough to change the playing track without a lag (previously, changing anything on a playing track would cause the track to stop for a second).
One thing that is still slow as ever is scrolling through tracks with the album artwork pane enabled. And iTunes still won’t let me rate an unselected track until it has loaded the artwork for that track. Also, adding artwork to multiple tracks, the other thing that was always the slowest in iTunes 8.0.2 and earlier, is still slow, though maybe just a little faster.
Smarter, yes, but I think the change in the size of the library is capital.
As for artwork, it would have to cache all your artwork to be able to display it more quickly. I think it’s the limitation of your hard disk that slows this down. This said, it seems faster here. Perhaps memory has something to do with it; I’ve recently added 4 GB more of RAM (I now have 8 GB) to my Mac Pro, so there’s less virtual memory being used (that is, there’s basically none).
I was really hoping that Apple would finally the large library problem, but I didn’t expect them to do so this soon. But on my old WinXP laptop, ripping time has apparently been divided by more than half (I’ll need more tests to see how it behaves depending on the number of tracks).
And the library file has been reduced 58 MB to less than 8 MB.
I’m overjoyed. I have over 34K songs and was unable to go past iTunes 7.5 without seeing beach balls for minutes at a time.
This is the iTunes I remember loving. Also, grid and cover flow views are now possible for me – with 7.5 it was far too slow to be an option.
Just heard you on Tech Night Owl and wanted to tell you my experience with upgrading to 8.1.
Over about five months, I had 73 freezes requiring a hard restart. Since I upgraded to 8.1 on March 12, I have gone 16 glorious days without incident. (There were many more freezes before this, but I started counting, documenting, and troubleshooting in earnest after I did an erase and install of the OS in October.)
My system would freeze (sometimes, unpredictably) when files were being added to iTunes, either via podcast download, use of Applescript to alter files, or being added by other software such as Audio Hijack Pro or EyeTV.
When I upgraded to 8.1, my library had about 11,500 files and was about 290 GB. The iTunes Library database file was 35.3 MB, but after upgrading shrunk to 5.8 MB. Changing genres on multiple files used to take a few seconds; today, it zips…
I am so happy that iTunes finally seems to just work. But it’s the kind of happy one gets when someone stops beating you up. I am scarred and a little fearful to move forward, wondering if it’s safe to turn on automatic downloading of podcasts or to let EyeTV files automatically export to iTunes while I am away from the computer. In the past six months or more, doing so would sometimes result in a freeze that would prevent other automated events from occurring.
I know it’s almost trite to say this: But I’ve owned Macs since 1987. This is the worst problem I ever had with an Apple product. Sorrowfully, it has shut me up from crowing about the superiority of the brand.
Normally, I wouldn’t ask these questions, I would accept the good fortune and move on. But why does this work so much better? Is the better performance entirely the result of the reduced size of the iTunes Library database file? And if so, why is it so much smaller now? And furthermore, is there a danger somewhere down the line that if my iTunes Library grows and the database file grows that iTunes will become sluggish and freeze-prone again?
Personally, I think they’ve done two things: reduced the size of the library file, so writing it is faster, and changed how often they write the file. I think it’s smaller because it’s compressed, or contains less data.
While the library file will certainly grow, it would take, in your case, about 6 times as much music as you have to get to its previous size. I think you’re safe. :-)
Why are you converting MP3 files to Apple Lossless before converting to AAC? Converting an MP3 file to Apple Lossless does not uncompress the audio. Those bits are lost forever once you rip the CD into MP3. You can eliminate this step and convert directly from MP3 to AAC, although you are going to degrade your sound quality because you’re re-transcoding. You should probably do as I do… rip to Apple Lossless and convert that to AAC, but keep both versions… Apple Lossless for home play and converting to future compression formats, and the AAC version for iPods.
I think it’s worth pointing out that the libraries mentioned in previous comments do not qualify as ‘large’ by some standards.
Most people in my position have long since abandoned the use of iTunes as Apple let us down years ago by not responding to numerous complaints about problems with library file size.
Even now, with 8.1, the figures presented in other comments suggest that my library file would still be in excess of 100mg’s.
Whadaya think?…is that going to run smoothly as a single library given past experience?
Um, let’s see, that would mean you have some 400,000 tracks or more? Because my library at around 38K tracks is 10 MB…
I’m with Anabella on this. I have over 120,000 tracks in iTunes and the slowness is unbearable. 8.1 didn’t change that for me.
I would love to switch to faster software for editing my library but that would mean re-importing every change I make to the music files back into iTunes, so I didn’t seriously consider it. I need iTunes for iPod syncing and iTunes Store music purchases and Apple TV and on and on…
What software you using, Anabella?
You seriously don’t see a difference with iTunes 8.1? After all, your library is much, much smaller, right?
Kirk, the file containing the pointers for my library may be smaller in size but the performance of the program remains unchanged.