With version 9 iTunes has become very very slow and is often unresponsive for a few seconds when I switch to it from another app. Any ideas for optimization? (I've turned off Crossfade, Sound Enhancer, Sound Check, and Sharing.)
MacBook Pro, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo,
Mac OS X (10.6.3)
I am having the same problem. I took my computer into the Genius bar and they suggested turning off all the same preferences that you turned off and letting it run for 24 hours or more. Apparently iTunes needs top get album art and other info all over again when it updates. I have let it run for over 24 hours and it is still slow. I have over 200 gigs of music so I am hoping it just needs a lot of time to work itself out. I was also hoping the 9.1.1 update would help. So far no good.Let me know if you have any luck.
If you have a big library (tens of thousands of songs or more) then itunes will get slow. The bigger the slower.
I assume you are running on your macbook. How much memory does it have? The delay you see when switching to iTunes maybe due to lack of memory and having itunes swap back in. You can use activity monitor to see if memory usage is an issue.
Also, if you are using power save features this can cause a lag (especially if the disk holding the itunes library has spun down) You might want to temporarily disable disk sleeping (and perhaps other power saving features) if you are plugged in. If it helps then you can seperately tune the pluged in v.s. battery settings to get it work as best as possible.
Last time I looked I could not find an alternative to iTunes that was better, but it has been a couple of years since I looked.
p.s. it could be a timing issue. Everytime a song finishes in iTunes it rewrites the whole database. While it is doing this iTunes will be unresponsive (it does not want you to make changes while it is writing). If you happen to click on itunes while it is writing its database then it will in fact be unresponsive until it is finished.
Thanks for your replies. And sorry about my very very late one.
This problem only seems to be getting worse. Maybe I just have too many tracks and too many playlists for iTunes. At the moment there's about 45,000 tracks in my library.
I've got 2GB RAM, maybe that's on the short side, but still it's not enough reason for iTunes to be this slow. I use Native Instruments' Traktor also, and even though it's a much heavier program (takes way more CPU), it's never as slow and unresponsive as iTunes.
My battery is dead, so I always use the adapter. And I've got the "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" deselected.
