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iTunes is unbelievable

I

inboulder

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 27, 2006
12
0
I've had it with iTunes 7. It takes 4-5 seconds to open a song, it takes 2-3 seconds of wheel spinning to even scroll, it takes 3-4 seconds just to respond to a menu click, it's shuffle is broken. In short it is a gigantic piece of ****.

In my current setup, iTunes on my macbook core duo is loaded with a few thousand songs playing off a SAN. Foobar 2000 (installed in paralells) and Amarok (linux partition) running on the same machine w/ the same SAN, open files in .1 of a sec, have no problem scrolling etc. Unfortunately under OS X there doesn't appear to be a reasonable alternative to itunes, if there is please somebody let me know. And whoever put out itunes 7, please die in a fire, that is all.
 
well i'd have to disagree, it does take a few seconds to open but thats because i'm past the 10k mark i'd wager. playing songs is fine for me though.

how much ram do you have and what else are you running with it? i could see this behavior if you only had 512ram and a bunch of other apps running at the same time....
 
Also, what are the specifics of the SAN and how OS X acquires its connection? I take it iTunes pile-of-****ness would mysteriously disappear if your songs were not on a SAN, which means that, if you actually want to improve this (and not just rant), you will need to look at how OS X and your SAN are working together.... Certainly a few thousand songs is nothing special for iTunes to handle, even on a G4. So it really has to be an OSX/SAN issue.
 
I only have 512mb ram and it loads almost instantly, no beachball during use either. Guess i'm being lucky...
 
mkrishnan said:
mysteriously disappear if your songs were not on a SAN, which means that, if you actually want to improve this (and not just rant), you will need to look at how OS X and your SAN are working together....
Click to expand...

I just want to rant about itunes 7 (itunes 5 wasn't too bad, only merely sluggish), please trust that I'm a sophisticated network engineer/sysadmin/programmer whos tried everything and understands the issues involved in depth.
 
I also noticed that iTunes seems to be getting slower with each update... I have a g4 iMac with 512 megs RAM and about 9000 songs. My Xbox 360 seems to be able to access them more quickly than iTunes. Not that big a deal, though, since I generally just use it as a server for my Xbox. I don't wish death on anyone...:(
 
inboulder said:
I just want to rant about itunes 7 (itunes 5 wasn't too bad, only merely sluggish), please trust that I'm a sophisticated network engineer/sysadmin/programmer whos tried everything and understands the issues involved in depth.
Click to expand...

I think mkrishnan asked a valid question. There could be something you missed or perhaps you're just starting out in OS X so you haven't grasped it's myriad gotchas. What is the exact setup/spec of the SAN and MB and how is the connection made?
 
mkrishnan said:
Also, what are the specifics of the SAN and how OS X acquires its connection? I take it iTunes pile-of-****ness would mysteriously disappear if your songs were not on a SAN, which means that, if you actually want to improve this (and not just rant), you will need to look at how OS X and your SAN are working together.... Certainly a few thousand songs is nothing special for iTunes to handle, even on a G4. So it really has to be an OSX/SAN issue.
Click to expand...

Then please tell me why my iTunes takes a good 7-8 secs to open with around 10,000 songs and about 80GB?

iTunes does get significantly slower with a lot of songs and GBs even in general usage.
But I agree that constant beach balling is wrong. Although iTunes does a lot of beachballing for me too when I change names, rate songs, play songs, etc. heavily.
 
i agree with the title of the thread, but at the complete opposite end.

i just discovered how many things you really can do on iTunes. it runs perfect for me on my MBP, never had any problems at all.

iTunes has really fascinated me with how many features it has, it really is unbelievable... but in a good way!
 
I've got 9,500 songs, so far, and it takes 10-12 secs to open. But I am running it on a 733MHz G4.

But I love iTunes 7. I've had no problems at all with it.
 
Another vote here for the wonderfulness of iTunes. 7 does take longer to open but it's only a few seconds of my life when I wake my mac up.
 
inboulder said:
I just want to rant about itunes 7 (itunes 5 wasn't too bad, only merely sluggish), please trust that I'm a sophisticated network engineer/sysadmin/programmer whos tried everything and understands the issues involved in depth.
Click to expand...

I'm not a sophisticated network engineer, and iTunes 7 gives me no such problems... go figure.
 
inboulder said:
I've had it with iTunes 7. It takes 4-5 seconds to open a song, it takes 2-3 seconds of wheel spinning to even scroll, it takes 3-4 seconds just to respond to a menu click, it's shuffle is broken. In short it is a gigantic piece of ****.

In my current setup, iTunes on my macbook core duo is loaded with a few thousand songs playing off a SAN. Foobar 2000 (installed in paralells) and Amarok (linux partition) running on the same machine w/ the same SAN, open files in .1 of a sec, have no problem scrolling etc. Unfortunately under OS X there doesn't appear to be a reasonable alternative to itunes, if there is please somebody let me know. And whoever put out itunes 7, please die in a fire, that is all.
Click to expand...

Well, as far as my experience goes, OS X isn't the best in working with a SAN. I've tried various types (samba, afp etc) and all types of networked share didn't perform well enough to stream audio over.

regardless of source and destination, and media (wired versus wireless)

from a mac to windows went OK
from a mac to a mac gave too much lag
from a windows to a mac gave too much lag

I just gave up on the whole deal and keep my songs local... i think it's a design flaw...

it does do the job for copying and stuff, just not for steaming
 
OwlsAndApples said:
I only have 512mb ram and it loads almost instantly, no beachball during use either. Guess i'm being lucky...
Click to expand...

Yeah ok, but what is the size of your iTunes library?. The loading time of iTunes depends heavily on the size of the library it loads, obviously.
 
d wade said:
i agree with the title of the thread, but at the complete opposite end.

i just discovered how many things you really can do on iTunes. it runs perfect for me on my MBP, never had any problems at all.

iTunes has really fascinated me with how many features it has, it really is unbelievable... but in a good way!
Click to expand...

*clears throat*

...and it's free.
 
I'm a very unsophisticated network engineer as I have to look after my own stuff. I'm not sure why the OP can't set up a small NAS for music (might even make more sense with Twonky et al, and darn it I'll get that working one day between the Mac and the NAS). One look at the I/O requirements, SMB/CIFS implementation, etc would make it pretty clear that using a SAN for this purpose and expecting it to be lightning-quick under 'as is' OS X is... well, I guess the term must be sophisticated :p

And this is also assuming the sophisticated network engineer isn't confusing a slow NAS with a SAN of course ;-)
 
i agree under windows, iTunes is painfully slow, but its so far quite responsive on my macs
 
Compile 'em all said:
Yeah ok, but what is the size of your iTunes library?. The loading time of iTunes depends heavily on the size of the library it loads, obviously.
Click to expand...

i'm not sure that's true, at all. can anyone verify this with real data, not just a reasonable guess? I think that it has little/no effect on load-up time, because the actual "Library" file that it loads is tiny.
 
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