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Help! Coverflow Lags in iTunes

I

Ino

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 11, 2005
72
0
Is anyone else out there is having lag issues with coverflow in iTunes 7...?? Some images do not load until I have stopped scrolling and waited a couple seconds, and even if they load the first time around, I have to wait for them to load again if I scroll away and scroll back. The same is true for music, videos, everything.

Does anybody know why this happens? Granted I don't have a 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro w/ 16GB RAM, but neither the Powerbook or PowerMac in the sig can do this smoothly. Actually, a coworker showed me coverflow on his iBook G4 and it doesn't have that problem...

A little more info: I do have album art for most of my songs, and my music library is roughly 10GB.

Any suggestions to help fix this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
 
Ino said:
Is anyone else out there is having lag issues with coverflow in iTunes 7...?? Some images do not load until I have stopped scrolling and waited a couple seconds, and even if they load the first time around, I have to wait for them to load again if I scroll away and scroll back. The same is true for music, videos, everything.

Does anybody know why this happens? Granted I don't have a 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro w/ 16GB RAM, but neither the Powerbook or PowerMac in the sig can do this smoothly. Actually, a coworker showed me coverflow on his iBook G4 and it doesn't have that problem...

A little more info: I do have album art for most of my songs, and my music library is roughly 10GB.

Any suggestions to help fix this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Click to expand...

I run a G5 w/ 20gb of iTunes songs and it does that for me too. I don't care for that feature anyhow.
 
It's annoying. I hope Apple fixes it somehow. Plus, when you scroll really quickly, it appears some of the albums get doubled or tripled but not so. It's a distracting visual artifact that I never had with CoverFlow RC1.
 
I have a Mac Mini PPC G4 and coverflow doesn't even load.

Haven't tried it on the iBook yet but I don't have great expectations. :eek:
 
I've got about 800 albums, 90% (ish) of which have artwork. CoverFlow view is surprisingly laggy on my MacBook Pro 2.0GHz. As others have said, it's considerably more so than the standalone CoverFlow app was.

I'm not about to get annoyed at this just yet. This is version 7.0.0, and will no doubt undergo some optimisation in upcoming point-releases (there seems to often be a little flurry of 0.0.x point-releases soon after a new major iTunes version)
 
Mine runs good, but sometimes doesn't load the cover art as soon as you get to it. It takes a second. Nothing too bad, IMO. I'd say that Apple will make it run better in a future update.

I keep mine in the "classic" list view, anyway.
 
is there a way to resize the album art files?

it seems that it has to load the larger images first before they appear in coverflow.

I alreadyt checked the album art folder, but it seems appel uses some (strange) standard instead of regular jpegs, so a batch resize doesn't work..
 
Thomas421 said:
I alreadyt checked the album art folder, but it seems appel uses some (strange) standard instead of regular jpegs, so a batch resize doesn't work..
Click to expand...

I notice that too when I went to edit my files.
 
It appears there is now an Album Artwork folder inside the regular iTunes folder with lots of scrambled folders and .ITC files. After a quick Google search, I found that the extension stands for "Uthscsa Imagetool Calibration File"...whatever that means.

Anyway, upon more observation it appears that only the album art for certain songs take longer to load, and it's usually the same culprits...music videos usually take longer to load their poster frame too.

I'm hoping 7.1 will fix this...
 
Ino said:
It appears there is now an Album Artwork folder inside the regular iTunes folder with lots of scrambled folders and .ITC files. After a quick Google search, I found that the extension stands for "Uthscsa Imagetool Calibration File"...whatever that means.
Click to expand...

I'd imagine that's a different .itc I'd imagine it's simply iTunes Cover :)

I would hazard a guess that when an album art is first loaded into CoverFlow view from an embedded image inside an MP3/AAC file, it's cached in these .itc files (the iTunes Artwork folder structure -- numeric subfolders -- is similar to other caches in OS X). Since CoverFlow is a 3D (OpenGL?) view, the images are probably stored in a format suitable for OpenGL textures.

I'd expect there to be some further optimisation, as you've noted. CoverFlow view could even take advantage of CoreAnimation in Leopard (in which case, it'd scream :))
 
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