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iTunes massive lag when playing anything

cloudnine

cloudnine

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 3, 2006
532
0
San Francisco, CA
I'm copying and pasting what I posted in the Apple Discussion Forums, so it might seem a little out of context, but it explains my problem pretty well. I posted it about a week and a half ago and haven't had any responses... I was hoping to have a little better luck here in MR:

First off, my entire library is on my iMac, not an external drive. I have about 130gb of music/video. It was fine until a week and a half ago (I don't remember installing anything differently or changing any settings) when it started stuttering when I played music. It seems to happen moreso with music that I've just added. I'll double click a song, and it will start playing, but iTunes will freeze so I can't pause it or switch to another song for anywhere from 10-30 seconds. Nothing noticeable in Activity Monitor, but I've noticed that if I have my Music folder open, in the iTunes folder, a file "Temp File.tmp" will appear for a few seconds then disappear.

The interesting thing to me is that I deleted my "iTunes Library" and "iTunes Music Library.xml" files from the iTunes library, then re-added all my music to iTunes (of course deleting all of my playlists, which I didn't think about until after the fact), and everything was playing perfectly... until I added about 5 more albums. Then it started doing the same thing all over again.

--------

Also, I've deleted iTunes (and all associated files thanks to AppCleaner), redownloaded it, and reimported my music library, and it's still doing the same thing. I also deleted and reinstalled Quicktime, but to no avail...

I've changed each and every setting in iTunes and nada. It's gotten to the point where it does just lag for a few seconds... it lags for about 20 seconds, frees up for about 3-4 seconds, lags for 10-20 seconds, frees up for 3-4 seconds, etc, etc. Mind you, when I say "lag", I mean iTunes freezes up, but the music keeps playing.

*sigh*
 
I'm having a similar problem, not only when I try to play a song though. If I click anything at all I'll get the spinning ball for a few minutes. It only started happening today and I haven't changed/installed anything on my mac.
 
i too experienced the stuttering problem yesterday (first time in my 3 yrs as a mac user) while playing an audiobook in iTunes. Problem then "solved itself" after a minute or so

I checked activity monitor and confirmed I had plenty of free memory, no strange processes running, no cpu overload ....
 
Iggy said:
I'm having a similar problem, not only when I try to play a song though. If I click anything at all I'll get the spinning ball for a few minutes. It only started happening today and I haven't changed/installed anything on my mac.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it got so bad that I actually reformat my iMac. Thank god for Time Machine :p If it happens again, I'm going to scream :D
 
I have the exact same problem, just started today...don't remember changing anything, adding anything or doing anything, I was even playing music off iTunes fine earlier today and then all the sudden when I'd play a song iTunes would freeze and I'd be unable to change the song. Occasionally it would unfreeze for a couple seconds but then revert back to the same problem. The timer doesnt run but the music plays fine. I tried restarting a couple times, didn't fix anything. I dont know what to do. This is making me mad. Hopefully this will fix itself.
 
Sounds like harddrive problem.

Harddrive failing often exhibit the symptoms you mention (slow access time), etc.
 
Consultant said:
Sounds like harddrive problem.

Harddrive failing often exhibit the symptoms you mention (slow access time), etc.
Click to expand...

If you hear strange noises (no, seriously), especially clicking noises, that could be it.

Or it could be file fragmentation, which is normally not a problem, but then 130GB of media files isn't the norm (I would think :p).

Or, it could be the system that iTunes uses to update its lists.

And last but not least, I wouldn't rule out a bug; there's only one way a bug gets fixed, so why don't you try sending Apple an email?
 
I reckon I've fixed it.

I went to home/library/preferences and deleted three files beginning with com.apple.iTunes... and hey presto! No problems! As soon as I restarted iTunes, it put some new files with the same names where the deleted ones used to be. From what I can see it hasn't affected iTunes at all, I was worried it might delete all preferences, playlists, etc. but nothing has changed as far as I can tell. Saying that, I don't want to be blamed if it messes up your mac, I'm just saying it worked for me.

Hurrah! Music!
 
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