iTunes Issues/SUPER slow (OS X, not XP)

[therunningboard]

Ok, so I have searched all over the internet and found no help or really any one else that seems to have my problem.

I rebooted my Macbook (2.1Ghz 4Gb RAM running 10.5.5)today (a rare occurrence, as I normally just let it sleep), and when I opened iTunes (8.0.2) it was SUPER slow loading all the music/thumbnails in Grid mode. Trying Coverflow was a joke, and no matter how many times I restart iTunes or reboot my computer it keeps doing this.

It will literally sit loading all this for a good 2-3 minutes, and if I try to do anything in iTunes (such as open an artist or change view) I get a beach ball for a bit before it does my bidding. Even after everything has "loaded", and I can scroll in Grid mode normally, if I open a artist, when I go back to all artists it has to reload again. I am by no means a computer novice, but I am baffled. All I can figure is somehow my iTunes library is screwed up? Nothing else is affected, all other apps run normally even while iTunes is running gay.

I have a somewhat large library, but not to excessive, 140 artists 380 albums, 21.83Gb...and this has seriously rendered iTunes all but useless to me right now...

SO, any help/ideas?

 

[therunningboard]

OH, and I even have downloaded iTunes again and installed it again...nadda

 

[miles01110]

Do you use Last.fm?

Open Activity Monitor when you start iTunes to see what process is hogging the CPU.

Also, are there any errors in the Console utility when you launch iTunes?

 

[therunningboard]

iTunes is the only thing that appears to be hogging it...but I still dont know why...no error messages in the console when I start it up

Also. When I have iTunes sitting at a spot where its doing its magic and loading thumbnails, thats when I have the high CPU usage spike, but once it loads the visible section it goes down to less than 1%, and as soon as I scroll farther down into my library, where it has not loaded the thumbnails, it spikes right back up again and takes 2-3 minutes to load all of them.

 

[therunningboard]

Oh, and no, I do not use last.fm or any other streaming service. iTunes just serves as my library and music management software, some podcast things, and iPhone management, thats it. I dont even use it for my videos.

 

[therunningboard]

I found articles to reload the itunes library on apples website, that didnt do anything. I also found one on how to completely remove itunes, which I did, and then reinstalled...still nothing...it seems to entirely have to do with loading of artwork...because even if I use list view (ugh), it takes it a couple seconds to load any artwork, or if I open a artist with 4 albums, it will take 10-20 seconds (noticeable lag) to load all 4 albums of artwork...which normally I would suspect I have a hardware issue if I saw this on a PC, but I am not noticing any significant lag in any other app...

 

[therunningboard]

The only thing that is (maybe) out of the ordinary, is that if I watch my itunes folder, and I make it lag (scrolling in my library) and then I glance back at my folder and it will have a temp file that keeps appearing and disapearing...which I assume might be normal.

*shrugs*


This is the first time I have found myself truly pissed at any apple product. I have Cog downloaded, and can play music from my library just fine, so my music didn't get screwed up or anything, I even tried removing everything I have added to my library in the last 2 weeks (in finder, not through itunes) and then restarting itunes, and to no avail

 

[therunningboard]

So, I was mistaken about saying its related to artwork...because if I just simply try to switch from say library to applications or to podcasts, it takes about 1-2 minutes, and actually appears to have hung itunes unless I wait it out.

 

[MyJelleo]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

Try moving your iTunes folder to a different location and testing out iTunes with just one or two songs loaded onto it. Tell me if you notice a difference.