iTunes slows down with 48.000 songs

Nathan, I'll give that a shot but I doubt it will do the trick. That does not stop the fact that iTunes has to manage the whole library.

assuming that each song is around 4 MB, that is 192,000 MB. Divide that by 1024 (1024 MB = 1 GB), you get around 188 GB. That's more than 6 30GB iPods, or more than 12 15GB iPods.

Originally posted by pedant
I have finally finished ripping my large CD collection and now have around 48,000 songs!

The problem is that this makes using iTunes very slow--not surprising given the amount of data I have. I need to spend some time fixing up CDDB typos, organisign genres, giving ratings etc but iTunes is now unbearably slow on my 17" flat-screen iMac. even finding tracks or scrolling is quite slow.

The good news is I run this machine as a server and when I access the library remotely (via Airport Extreme), the access is very fast. However, I cannot edit the info remotely.

Any ideas? eg a standalone app that allows you to edit and massage track info?

I get the same effect in iPhoto. I have several thousand photos in iPhoto, and loading iPhoto (and working in iPhoto) is very very slow; even with a 1GHz processor w/768 RAM. Point is large amount of files = large amount of drag.

AppleScript is your friend!

If you library is SLOW, then you need to rebuild it. I have started rebuilding mine once every 2 or 3 months, especially when I add lots of new music to it. The database file just gets funky. Delete the library and then just add all your tunes back it. It will improve the performance tremendously...

Uh, no. The tag info is save in the file on your HDD. The iTunes library is simply a database of the tag info that iTunes creates. I WOULD recommend, before deleting your library, that you select all of the song in your library, click on ADVANCED > ID3 TAGS >ID3 TAG VERSION and set it to V2.4 and let it go. That way you can be sure all of the tags iTunes is displaying are actually written to the corresponding files...

Originally posted by baggss
Uh, no. The tag info is save in the file on your HDD. The iTunes library is simply a database of the tag info that iTunes creates. I WOULD recommend, before deleting your library, that you select all of the song in your library, click on ADVANCED > ID3 TAGS >ID3 TAG VERSION and set it to V2.4 and let it go. That way you can be sure all of the tags iTunes is displaying are actually written to the corresponding files...

Ok! This is what I wanted to hear. I know the tag info is saved in the file itself... but i swear the tags get funky sometimes. I know I've changed the tag info on the same songs a few times. Converting the tags to V2.4 will write everything (tags) I have in the Library to the file itself? Just double checking.

Also, as dekkerd said. I am concerned about losing my playcounts. Anyway around this.

Thanks for you help on Spymac too. I apologize for the double post. I thought I'd get more hits there.

Originally posted by ultrazero
Ok! This is what I wanted to hear. I know the tag info is saved in the file itself... but i swear the tags get funky sometimes. I know I've changed the tag info on the same songs a few times. Converting the tags to V2.4 will write everything (tags) I have in the Library to the file itself? Just double checking.

Also, as dekkerd said. I am concerned about losing my playcounts. Anyway around this.

Thanks for you help on Spymac too. I apologize for the double post. I thought I'd get more hits there.

I know that since I started using the convert to V2.4 function, all of my tags have remained stable and the same. I suppose your mileage may vary, but mine has not. As for play counts etc, I can not say as I never use them anyways. If your really want to check the status of your tags, check them with another editor before you wipe the iTunes library to see what they look like.

Originally posted by ultrazero
Ok! This is what I wanted to hear. I know the tag info is saved in the file itself... but i swear the tags get funky sometimes. I know I've changed the tag info on the same songs a few times. Converting the tags to V2.4 will write everything (tags) I have in the Library to the file itself? Just double checking.

Also, as dekkerd said. I am concerned about losing my playcounts. Anyway around this.

Thanks for you help on Spymac too. I apologize for the double post. I thought I'd get more hits there.

The tags sure can get funky, it can get quite frustrating. The solution to this for me was to make sure the permissions were correct for the mp3's. It's not uncommon to unrar an album and you'll have read only permissions.

iTunes won't alert you to this and will let you tag the files as usual, sometimes you can play it will appear as if its worked. But wait little while or get info and you'll see the old tag info there because iTunes only wrote the new tags to the cache and not the mp3 file as well.

Before you convert all the tags to version 2.4, get info on the iTunes Music folder and go to the Ownership & Permissions section, it should read "You can" and the drop down menu should have "Read & Write". To make sure all the files within the library are like that click the "Apply to enclosed items..." button.

On the performance of iTunes, I have 11,000 songs, so it's understandable that iTunes is taking a while filtering through that many entries but it needs some optimization, I get beach balled far too often. I'm about to try importing my XML library in the hope that iTunes will rebuild a faster library file. It would probably give a faster library if I just added the files again but I'm not prepared to lose my date added and playcount metadata.

It seems iTunes will ignore the date added and playcount attributes of the XML file when importing, which is a shame because I need to keep both. I thought it would at least keep the playcounts, as it did when my Library became corrupt (a whole nother iTunes issue) and it recovered it with the XML file.

A new version of iTunes would've been nice with iLife '05 but to make improvements it's gotta keep in sync with the Windows version, so it'd take longer to see changes. It would be good to do what they did with iPhoto, although there are many other areas where they can optimize it compared to just parsing a library file. Still, iTunes feels the same as it was back on OS 9.