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itunes: the most broken apple product.

M

mgsarch

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 19, 2008
155
0
I love apple (of course), and I LOVE my mac pro. But, I am growing to hate itunes in every way. :mad:

I have a huge library (50,000+). Importing the library took several days when I first set it up. It was making my system crawl. This week, I totally reconfigured my system.

The library is now going to be located on a Raid 0 partition that uses 4 WD 640s in RAID 0. My HD benchmarks are, as we'd guess, very fast, copying is crazy fast. Yet, when I went to setup iTunes, 'adding' the directories to the library (with itunes set to orgnize the lib) took an INCREDIBLY long time. Much much longer than if I had just copied the folders. This was mind boggling to me because, the directories are already organized by itunes and I can't understand how it's taking more than a few seconds per each song.

Any ideas?

Any ideas why itunes duplicate control is the worst and most unintuitive thing I've ever encountered. This is a 7th generation native app .. WTF. How is not smart enough to ask me before importing the same song 5 times.

So frustrated :\

I have a Ubuntu partition, Amarok has NONE of these issues. Apple .. WAKE UP.
 
I just installed an Ubuntu partition. Its cool! sry about your itunes problems, its runs fine with my library of around 2000.
 
iTunes 7 has been out almost 2 years!

Most people forget how long iT7 has been out. If Apple doesn't have iTunes 8 out by this Sept then it would have taken longer for Apple to move one full generation forward for iTunes than for the avg OS X release.

I expect iTunes 8 to have massive performance improvement as it's undoubtedly going to have to manage larger files with HD video. The UI needs an overhauling as well.

Apple knows iTunes is it's front end to Digital Lifestyle. iT8 is going to impress. Here's hoping they have a client/server options for people that want to consolidate all computer clients to one massive media collections.
 
A server version of iTunes? Lol.

Anyone else remember iTunes 1.0? Quite a bit different. I think iTunes 2.1 might have been my favorite :)

As for why it took so long, I imagine it had to do with processing 50,000+ songs... it has to do work on each song, analyzing the volume, making for gapless playback, determining whether there's album art, then sorting by artist, or name, or whatever. That's a disgusting amount of information. I personally have about 500 songs... I can't imagine why you'd even have 50,000... I"m sure you haven't listened to them all, and even if you have, you certainly can't identify them when you hear them. Why don't you just pick what you like instead of dumping albums? If I did that, I'd have probably about 4000 or so songs, possibly more. Actually I wouldn't, because I don't pay for music... but you get the idea. Wasted time/space.
 
I wouldn't be surprised to see iT8 at the WWDC to coincide with the iPhone 2.0 release. 3G should bring HD content to the iPhone and I think iTunes 8 will enable that.
 
To the OP, if you have your iTunes library already set up, why not just move the folder, then point iTunes to the location (hold option when opening)? I have done this several times when moving my library with no hiccups (although your library is over an order of magnitude larger than mine).
 
Firefly2002 said:
A server version of iTunes? Lol.

Anyone else remember iTunes 1.0? Quite a bit different. I think iTunes 2.1 might have been my favorite :)

As for why it took so long, I imagine it had to do with processing 50,000+ songs... it has to do work on each song, analyzing the volume, making for gapless playback, determining whether there's album art, then sorting by artist, or name, or whatever. That's a disgusting amount of information. I personally have about 500 songs... I can't imagine why you'd even have 50,000... I"m sure you haven't listened to them all, and even if you have, you certainly can't identify them when you hear them. Why don't you just pick what you like instead of dumping albums? If I did that, I'd have probably about 4000 or so songs, possibly more. Actually I wouldn't, because I don't pay for music... but you get the idea. Wasted time/space.
Click to expand...

I think your vision is a bit too myopic here. I see nothing funny about a server version of iTunes. As iTunes has grown the size of the media has grown from just music to now gigabytes of video. What's an easier to manage solution for a family of four? Four seperate iTunes libraries for wouldn't it be more ideal to have a single library with 4 unique db which contain user specific metadata (ie ratings, EQ settings etc).

50k songs isn't that much. Assuming and avg of 14 songs per CD that's roughly 3400 CDs. That's a lot of music but I know people that have that many CDs. After all CD has been around for two decades.
 
I agree. *Even* with a 'modest' ~12k songs, my iTunes library is very sluggish...
 
I just deleted my library and reimported everything. It took 38 minutes for just under 37,000 songs. I have not found any sluggishness after the songs are imported, although I never let itunes organize my music.
 
lol I feel so inferior now, I always thought I had a large music collection - only 3008 songs. :eek:
 
I agree with the OP. I have my music, 37K worth of songs on a server spread over 4 hard drives. It takes forever for the music to load. I think a server model would be great. Having multipal machines access to a single library already setup in iTunes. I would also like a search function to look for new music on the network. I hate having to add in my new music. I would like to be able to set iTunes search folders x,y,z each day or week etc for new music, media etc. Only having to manage one iTunes library that would be nice.

I also have my wife's computer accessing the music from her machine and I also have a third stereo component in the living room accessing the music. Hence the reason for the server....
 
do you guys even listen to all those songs? LOL, I have 5000 songs in my ext HD, like 2000 in my ipod and out of all those songs, I only listen to 100 that are in my iPod Playlist,:p
I totally agree that Apple should release a new iTunes' someday before the year ends.
 
cloudnine said:
I couldn't have said it better myself... I'm keeping my fingers crossed!
Click to expand...

It will be. iTunes 8.x needs to be a 64-bit app. Why? Because it's one app that could make some use out of utilizing a lot of RAM

iTunes needs to give ME far more control over the display of my multimedia content and advanced editing features (like "date added" and other fields)

Apple could also give us the coup de grace. Give us Apple Lossless II. This would allow you to rip CD content into a lossless format but when you hooked up your iPhone or iPod it would send over a 256k or user selectable "lossy" version. I know there are codecs that do this now.

One Library to rule them all!
 
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