Very poor iTunes performance and freeze

BuRaK

BuRaK

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Hi All,

I have a music lover client who asked me to make a system for him (3 years ago). To create a iTunes library for all his music.

We're talking:
-Apple Lossless
-16,488 Albums
-133,552 Tracks

Quite a large collection made up of large files.

iTunes is installed on the primary drive (500 GB SSD)
He has 3x SATA 5400RPM 2TB Each Storage drives. We use these for media storage. All tracks are dragged and dropped into iTunes so it can point to the tracks on each HDD.

System is Core i5 with 2.6GHZ / Windows 7 x64 / 12GB DDR3 RAM / Gigabyte P55-USB3 Motherboard.

His problem is when he tries to enter anything in the search field of iTunes, system may stop for 5 minutes and sometimes even longer. Doing most everything takes forever in iTunes at times it freezes up for 20 minutes then comes back to life.

Is this a hardware / software limitation in your opinion or do we have some other problem?

He'll pay good $$$ to upgrade his machine but I'm hesitating on promising any results since I have never seen an iTunes with this many songs in it.

Many thanks!!
 
His problem is when he tries to enter anything in the search field of iTunes, system may stop for 5 minutes and sometimes even longer. Doing most everything takes forever in iTunes at times it freezes up for 20 minutes then comes back to life.
Click to expand...

Typical iTunes. :rolleyes:

You would think they would have fixed this by now, but the software just seems to get more bloated & a resource hog with each release.

I like iTunes for auto downloads of the many podcasts that I listen to but I experience the same issues you mention, IF I click around in a hurry. Seems that if I work slowly, it won't freeze quite to the extent that you are describing.

In your situation, he has a huge library, and the search is taking a bit of time to sift through all of that. I say it is a limitation of the iTunes software...

I had less problems with earlier versions, although it has always been buggy. I recently tried to go back in time & install an earlier version & the library format wouldn't work...

As soon as I discover something better, I will leave iTunes behind, that's for sure.
 
Hello, I had issue with freezing and stuttering iTunes.
No matter what I did nothing could help - even Windows reinstalation-
At the end - it was the hard drive - I did replaced it and all was good!
 
i know it saying the obvious but have you tried using something like foobar2000 to use as an alternative or the very least a speed comparison.

I know many people get stuck in the must use itunes syndrome but there a wealth of great music apps out there for the audiophile.
 
PCSupportGlasgow said:
i know it saying the obvious but have you tried using something like foobar2000 to use as an alternative or the very least a speed comparison.

I know many people get stuck in the must use itunes syndrome but there a wealth of great music apps out there for the audiophile.
Click to expand...

Foo is great but he likes the ability to stream to his Apple TV :(
 
JustInspired said:
I think you need to give us more info...

Did this suddenly start happening or has it always been like this or has it just got worse over time / adding more tracks?

Is iTunes excluded from his security software?

Is Genius turned on or off?

Have you looked at: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4582186?start=0&tstart=0
Click to expand...

Happened quite quickly. It wasn't over a period of time it got slow.

Genius was off.

Article you posted might have done it!

Testing now...
 
BuRaK said:
Testing the drives now, good idea!
Click to expand...

I agree with testing drives.

But otherwise, iTunes on an (or several) external drives is just slower (especially with a large library). I know with iTunes in OSX, the spotlight process with OSX indexes the iTunes library for faster searches. Obviously this means there is no indexing feature built into iTunes to the best of my knowledge. That is, unless iTunes for Windows they added that feature knowing it wouldn't have Spotlight to do it.

Edit: Just seen in iTunes, the default is set to search entire library (it's a dropdown immediately to the left of the search box on a Mac). ITunes 11 enabled that by default where previous versions hadn't. I'd also un-check that and test.
 
Last edited:
This is probably a bit out there, but assuming that everything checks out hardware-wise, is there any possibility of steering him in the direction of an itunes alternative?

Its such a ****** piece of software, and has been for a long time. Surely if he can possibly go there, something different could provide a longer-term solution to the performance issue?

http://getmusicbee.com/ ?
 
16k_zx81 said:
This is probably a bit out there, but assuming that everything checks out hardware-wise, is there any possibility of steering him in the direction of an itunes alternative?

Its such a ****** piece of software, and has been for a long time. Surely if he can possibly go there, something different could provide a longer-term solution to the performance issue?

http://getmusicbee.com/ ?
Click to expand...

Heck that would be the smart thing to do but then he can't play the songs through his Apple TV which for some reason means the whole world to him. He loves the large cover art on his TV screen I guess
 
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