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iTunes is lagging

C

c-hass

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 26, 2010
32
0
Montpellier, France
Hello folks,

The problem started just 2 days ago. I was playing some music, and suddenly it stopped. I look at iTunes, the song was in Play mode, but not playing, you know. I skipped to the next song, and it solved the problem.
But now it keeps coming back, and I also noticed that the whole system starts lagging, for a few seconds then goes stable again.

I checked out my activity monitor, and iTunes is normal, and I usually have 5-6 gigs of ram free.

I ran the disk utility tests, thinking it might be a HDD-related problem, but it wasn't the case, the test came out green.

All my music is on my internal HDD. It's a 320gig.

I'm under Lion 10.7.1, Macbook pro i5 2.4, 8 gigs of ram.
 
Only thing I can think of is the hard disk is going to sleep. Do you have that checked in your Energy Saver preferences?
 
What is the processor utilization reported in Activity Monitor when this is happening? Are you listening to music locally (attached to the laptop) or over a wireless network? Is Spotlight indexing? Is Time Machine actively archiving?
 
Lacking any more interesting info (see above questions) this might be the early signs of drive failure. Make sure you have a backup of your system/data just in case.
 
tamvly said:
What is the processor utilization reported in Activity Monitor when this is happening? Are you listening to music locally (attached to the laptop) or over a wireless network? Is Spotlight indexing? Is Time Machine actively archiving?
Click to expand...

Didn't notice the processor in the AM, I'll do it next time it lags.
My music as I said is local, on my local hard drive, single partition. Spotlight is not indexing, and I'm not using Time Machine.

tamvly said:
Lacking any more interesting info (see above questions) this might be the early signs of drive failure. Make sure you have a backup of your system/data just in case.
Click to expand...

damn!
Off to a backup! But is there a way to know if the drive is failing? As I said I made the disk utility tests, and nothing showed.
Anyway, the MCP is still under guarantee, can apple do anything for me?
 
OK, so apparently it's not processor utilization, nor competing processes. You already said that memory is not problem. And the music is coming directly from the MBP and is not being transmitted over a wireless network. And the disk seems to be running OK.

The leads me to think that it's some sort of hardware problem. I assume the music is going over a mini-port cable to speakers or to an amplifier of some sort. Have you checked the cable and amp to make sure they are working properly?

If nothing else, and if there's an Apple store nearby you might want to take it in for a check-up.

BTW, how often does this happen?

Remember to do that backup ...
 
tamvly said:
OK, so apparently it's not processor utilization, nor competing processes. You already said that memory is not problem. And the music is coming directly from the MBP and is not being transmitted over a wireless network. And the disk seems to be running OK.

The leads me to think that it's some sort of hardware problem. I assume the music is going over a mini-port cable to speakers or to an amplifier of some sort. Have you checked the cable and amp to make sure they are working properly?

If nothing else, and if there's an Apple store nearby you might want to take it in for a check-up.

BTW, how often does this happen?

Remember to do that backup ...
Click to expand...


Well, the funny thing is that I tried to play the music for a while in VLC (especially the songs that lagged) and it ran perfectly.
And I don't really think it's hardware, because when the music lags, iTunes stop responding for a while (I get the rainbow cursor).
Should I try to uninstall then install iTunes? Could that help?
 
c-hass said:
Well, the funny thing is that I tried to play the music for a while in VLC (especially the songs that lagged) and it ran perfectly.
And I don't really think it's hardware, because when the music lags, iTunes stop responding for a while (I get the rainbow cursor).
Should I try to uninstall then install iTunes? Could that help?
Click to expand...

iTunes is notorious for being slow at times. It lags a lot when you scroll through 2000+ songs, and when it does more than 2 operations at once (consolidating & syncing, for example).
 
mrsir2009 said:
iTunes is incredibly bloated. Apple needs to reconstruct the whole thing to make it lighter and less resource intensive.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, true.

In general, I have found that managing more than 100,000 tracks at a time through iTunes is a waste of time. (I have 145,000 songs and iTunes takes its time to load) I guess my itl file is megabytes in size.

Not to speak about the organizational problems I am facing such as duplicate tracks, missing artwork, etc.

I wonder if there would ever be a good media library program which does not lag, is light, and at the same time allows you to manage easily large mediatheques. Something like Spotify for instance (streamligned interface, quick to load, tons of music)- but where you don't have to pay and have all of your own offline music appear the same way =). :(
 
bloutrein said:
Unfortunately, true.

In general, I have found that managing more than 100,000 tracks at a time through iTunes is a waste of time. (I have 145,000 songs and iTunes takes its time to load) I guess my itl file is megabytes in size.

Not to speak about the organizational problems I am facing such as duplicate tracks, missing artwork, etc.

I wonder if there would ever be a good media library program which does not lag, is light, and at the same time allows you to manage easily large mediatheques. Something like Spotify for instance (streamligned interface, quick to load, tons of music)- but where you don't have to pay and have all of your own offline music appear the same way =). :(
Click to expand...

ive never used this but ive seen it mentioned a few times as peoples favorite apps

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24852/vox
 
And frankly Safari isn't light either. I love Safari, especially the new one with Lion, but it's a damn memory eater. Sometimes after 2 or 3 hours of use, it eats up to 4 gigs of ram!

I've been also experiencing system crashes the past few weeks, turned out to be a Safari thing. I disabled flash, and so far, it's running very smoothly.

Thanks for the Vox link, I'm gonna try it right away.
 
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