Determining Gapless playback and Processing album artwork is painfully slow

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Determining Gapless playback and Processing album artwork is painfully slow

I am running iTunes 10 on my macbook running 10.5.8. I have all my music on a server on the local network, and the mac user has full control on the share. When I try to build my library of about 6000 songs the "Processing album artwork" and "determining gapless playback is painfully slow. It has been running for almost 24 hours and is only half way through. The worst part is itunes is completly locked up while it is doing this, so I cant do anything with it. Cant check any preferences, cant click anywhere, just get the pinwheel.

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Oct 3, 2010 7:18 AM

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Answer 1

WeeBie Author

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Oct 4, 2010 1:06 PM in response to WeeBie

So after a full 24 hours my library is built and is working for now. But a couple things about this are pretty ridiculous.

1-The fact that it takes 24 hours to build a library of 6000 songs.
2-Even more ridiculous is that iTunes is completely locked while building said library. Why cant it do things like processing album artwork and determining gapless playback in the background. So even if it does take 24 hours, you could still use iTunes, and it doesn't look like it has completely crashed. Please do something about this apple, its pretty stupid.

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Answer 2

Oct 5, 2010 4:00 AM in response to WeeBie

Same Problem here ....

When adding a new Album, it takes iTunes ages to determine the info and while doing that it freezes. Music Files are on a QNAP TS-209 Pro II, access via SMB.

I would really appreciate some help because like this iTunes is no longer usable to me.

Thanks very much in advance,
MonsieurP

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Answer 3

Oct 12, 2010 2:58 PM in response to WeeBie

I would be thanking the heavens if I only had to wait 24 hours for this stupid gapless playback to finish rebuilding my music library. I'm a DJ and iTunes 10 had screwed up everything for me. I'm going back to 9 and NEVER upgrading again. This is no exaggeration, I have 140 gigs of music and at the present rate, I'm looking at over a week for this thing to do all my music. My mac book pro is useless for that time period. What ***** is I don't even want gapless playback but I can't get into the preferences to turn it off.

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Answer 4

d4hender

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Oct 19, 2010 8:48 PM in response to WeeBie

Glad I found this thread as i'm experiencing the same and it's driving me crazy. Do the Apple folks monitor these posts??

btw: I'm running Snow Leopard in x64 mode. Would this contribute to the problem?

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Answer 5

Caslon

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Nov 9, 2010 8:47 PM in response to WeeBie

I have had the same issue and have yet to find out how to fix this problem. It's about all I can take from iTunes. I'll be switching to my PC and WMP to listen to my music from now on. I am very displeased with Apple. They really dropped the ball on this one......

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Answer 6

databong

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Nov 16, 2010 11:55 AM in response to Caslon

Same problem here. 30 hours and counting on album artwork processing for 6,800 songs. Same problem on my Mac and my Thinkpad/Win7 machines. Incredible this one made it out the door. Talk about a sour taste in the mouth.

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Answer 7

d4hender

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Nov 30, 2010 8:34 PM in response to d4hender

fyi: I gave up on the latest iTunes, and downgraded to the previous release. Working much better now.

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Answer 8

brcnsky

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Dec 13, 2010 8:33 AM in response to WeeBie

Same thing here. Some 6000 tracks, library located locally, files on a NAS. After 8 hours 40 of about 500 album artworks have been processed. I finally forced quit iTunes.

Based on a hint found at http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=19428 I removed ~/Music/iTunes and all of the com.apple.iTunes.* files in ~/Library/Preferences. And there were a lot of them.

Afterwards I rebooted the system, started iTunes, adapted the Preferences and imported the tracks. Two hours or so later everything was set up again.

And yes, all the playlists were gone, which was not an issue for me in this particular case.

Now there are only three of the com.apple.iTunes.* plist files, as opposed to roughly 45 before. Perhaps this is part of the story.

As always, your mileage may vary.

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Answer 9

mbyerly

Level 1

4 points

Jun 27, 2011 10:49 AM in response to WeeBie

I am so glad I found this post. My 10.6.8 SL with latest itunes is doing the exact same thing over 8 months after the OP.

I will try this tip to see if it makes a difference. It could be my problem since I just moved to a new drive (which had to move my home directory and had to move my music).

Apple needs to fix this. I have 90 gigs worth of music and this will take a week to do if I let it run. No reason for this as it's obvisouly itunes. My machine is running nothing else while this happens and the CPU is sitting idle. The disk drives are doing nothing either (viewed via istat disk activity monitor). So I know it's not a resouce issue.

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