How many songs can iTunes handle?

It's a database. It will depend on your PC's RAM and processing power.

iTunes may slow down as you tax the limits of your PC. Where and when that happens will be different for each user.

I have close to 12,000 song references contained within iTunes and have no problematic slowness within iTunes. It will take several seconds to read the Library database file on startup, and it takes some time to write the two files at closing.

I have seen folks here with over 15,000 references within iTunes. I do not know if there is an upper limit.

As was stated before, iTunes is just a way to organize any music that is on your computer.

So the amount of songs will depend on your computer hard drive size and amount of RAM.

iTunes should be able to hold upwards of 15,000 songs, because that is the largest ipod.
However, I have heard of people with more than 20,000.

In my opinion, iTunes would in theory be able to handle as many songs as you can give it (although I would think that eventually iTunes may slow down a little bit).

Hi, I have 90,000 Mp3 (730 GIGAS) with ALL ARTWORKS insert in the ID3v2 in external hard drive 1 TERA with FIREWIRE 800 and yes iTunes get slow and sometimes to many slow. I cant find an answer for this or acelerator software to fix this problem. I use Lame 192-256-320kbps for all my Mp3.

If anybody knows how to fix this i will apriciate the answer

Regards

If anybody knows how to fix this i will apriciate the
answer

RAM, RAM, and more RAM. Look at the Task Manager and see how much memory iTunes is consuming. Then get at least double or triple that amount of RAM.

Realistically, I see no point in having less than a gig of RAM nowadays anyway, but if you've got that big of a library, 2 or even 4 gig might be in order.

Yes, I have 2 Gigas RAM and I can't add any more Ram to my computer.

Sony Vaio P.4 | 3.0ghz | 2 Gigas Ram | SP2 | XP Home

Any other idea! thanks.

FWIW,

I have a large library of over 100 000 aac files that is referenced to some drives on an Apple Internet server via afp, and it is very, very slow...
It is on a 2gb Dual G4. Unusable I am afraid....
It seems the databse in itunes could perhaps be optimized to handle
very large libraries better?
I experimented with Filemaker Pro doing the same thing and it is much faster.

Ah well...YMMV...
But it would be great if it could work better with very large libraries referenced...
And I would really appreciate user tips or workarounds for this.

thanx and all the best
Janne A.

this is more of an addendum than a response. I have a friend who is having issues with loading music in ITunes--she is getting an error that her library is full--she only has 475 songs loaded. I have thousands loaded in my ITunes library. Do you think it may have something to do with the size of the IPod associated with that library???

You may want to look into Libra iTunes library manager. See This Link

Libra creates, renames, deletes and activates separate iTunes libraries (including playlists and preferences.) Since iTunes doesn’t support multiple libraries natively, Libra actually shuts down and relaunches iTunes when you activate another library. Great for family computers used by people with different musical tastes, Libra also can break down a large digital audio collection into faster, more manageable chunks. Libra is shareware built by independent developer Steve Roy who asks for a reasonable $10 donation, available for Mac OS X and Windows.

Hello again,

So I bought and tried Libra...does not work for me at all with this size libraries....
It seems to simply take too long for Itunes to load the Libraries
so Libra thinks something is wrong and sends out error messages.

In short...using Itunes with a library of this size seems a No-No.
at least with my Dual G4 and the max Ram of this computer 2gb...:<)
Ah well...will have to try and find some other software that does work
with large libraries I guess..

best
Jan