Since installing itunes 9, i get a spinning beach ball every couple of seconds/minutes. Sometimes it goes away, but I seem to have to force quit every couple of minutes. I have reinstalled the software twice. Not sure how to fix, as the program is basically unusable now.
iTunes 10.0 still doesn't fix the frequent beachballs. Still unusable for videos and almost unusable for audio or media management. All of iTunes 9 has passed by without a fix. Pathetic.
The wheel has been whizzing all night while determining the gapless information for my library. My questions: 1. Is there a way to turn it off? 2. Why is it neccessary to have the gapless info for the library? 3. Why cannot this process be done in the background.
Apples gadgets are cool; Itunes software is clumsy! The program is unusable!
480 days since the first post, and iTunes is finally working without beachballing for a minute at almost every click.
10.1.1 didn't fix it. No surprise there.
What did was installing Apples QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component.
I installed this in the faint hope that it might let me play mpeg 2 videos with mp2 sound.
This worked, both in quickview and QuickTime Player. Very nice.
So I tried it in iTunes.
iTunes thrashed my disk for countless minutes without the usual brief pauses.
I thought it was dead, but it eventually stopped spinning.
It must have gotten all of the spinning out of it's system, since after that, it has been working normally.
What a nice surprise.
I listened to the Tech Guy Leo Laporte on XM radio callers called into his show asking about this and he said from what he can tell it has something to do with Apple QuickTime not being installed first, suggested that you install QuickTime first reboot then itunes. he also stated that this is a problem with Microsoft windows and not apple o.s. go figure. I ended up uninstalling all apple products on dell laptop (windows xp Home edition sp 3) running ccleaner then doing a defrag and then a complete reinstall of QuickTime and itunes, I also had to master reset my iphone and re sync everything from scratch.
There seems to be several problems reported in this thread.
1. crashes.
2. hangs of at least 90 minutes.
3. hangs of about a minute with lots of disk activity.
Quite a few people had their music on another disk (like I do).
I had problem 3. I never HAD to force quit, but sometimes did.
The caller to Leo was unable to sync his iPhone. I never had that problem.
It is now better, so I don't have to remove all Apple software from my Mac 🙂 although I probably will when 10.7 (Lion) comes out.
I still get many short hangs (a second or three, instead of a minute or three).
It is 60 times better than before installing the MPEG-2 Playback Component.
Not perfect but quite usable.
I've got a MacMini that I picked up brand new in September of 2009 (with max upgraded CPU and RAM available at the time), a Macbook Air that I picked up in December of 2010, and an iMac i7 (fastest available) in January of 2011. All my music resides on a NAS (QNAP TS-509 Pro) and my house LAN is Gig-E hardwired. And I get beachball city no matter which computer (or OS rev or iTunes version) is trying to run iTunes. iTunes is simply awful if you have alot of music. And since I started buying compact disks back in 1985, I have ALOT of music. With my iTunes library at nearly 43,000 songs, the software is utterly unusable, which as a result wreaks havoc on my ability to also manage my four iPhone devices.
I love Apple products. I love OS-X. But I abhor iTunes. It is the chink in the chain, and by no means a small one.
