iTunes 11 for Mac: Search is completely broken.

Same problem here!!!! Trying to search for 'Angel of the Morning' on my Library, and iTunes freezes completely. Not even the first letter appears on the search box.

Trying some other letters at the beginning of the search like Enigma, Vangelis, ZZ Top, takes quite a few seconds to display the results, but it doesn't freeze. Some times the cooling fans starts to speed up.

When it does freeze, Activity Monitor says iTunes is taking 100% CPU cycles and Real Memory is up to 2.2 GIGA Bytes.

I'm wondering who's head it is going to roll next at Apple.

I have about 4,600 albums. Search still works, it seems, but is almost useless because it is now so slow that the beach ball spins and spins. Apple has never seemed fond of users with large libraries. Given the company's propensity to simply vaporize existing features, I'm just happy I can still access my collection.

Mine freezes too!

It seems that the reason is that search is "live." So when you start by typing "a" iTunes wants to search every item that contains that letter. And then "an," and "ang," and "ange" and "angel."

Terrible implementation, it would appear.

Sorry, not seeing this behavior on my system and I also have a large library. Searching the store is fast too.

Yes, I know 'live" search is very expensive on a large Library, it seems that Apple doesn't test the program with a very large library... 😟

lkrupp wrote:

Sorry, not seeing this behavior on my system and I also have a large library. Searching the store is fast too.

Try this. Select Playlists and then an artist playlist from the left-side scroll list. Then type "angel" to search entire library, and make sure you filter by "all." When I do that the beach ball spins for 20 seconds before the search is completed.

Is you library on an external drive like mine is?

macCesar wrote:

Yes, I know 'live" search is very expensive on a large Library, it seems that Apple doesn't test the program with a very large library... 😟

Apple has always seemed all but indifferent to iTunes users with larger libraries. (Hence Match is only availble for libraries up to 25,000 songs, while a major competitor accommodates much larger libraries.)

When I turned off "Search Entire Library" via the magnifying glass icon/dropdown, it stopped doing this to me. Still seems like something's broken here, but this might help in the meanwhile?

Library size is around 140 GB.

Genettic wrote:

When I turned off "Search Entire Library" via the magnifying glass icon/dropdown, it stopped doing this to me. Still seems like something's broken here, but this might help in the meanwhile?

Library size is around 140 GB.

I've seen another poster suggest this solution, give it a shot.

AC

Genettic wrote:

When I turned off "Search Entire Library" via the magnifying glass icon/dropdown, it stopped doing this to me.

When I search, I almost always want to search the entire library.

drewbie-do-be-do wrote:

Yep - that was it!

Click the arrow by the hour glass and de-select search entire library. THAT seems to take the "search by each letter" option away - now I can type "The Grey Album" - hit enter - THEN it searches.

Very nice.

And it DOES appear to search the whole library. So back to all is well.

I wonder if search whole library accesses iCloud for nondownloaded content slowing it down.

drewbie-do-be-do wrote:

And it DOES appear to search the whole library. So back to all is well.

But that isn't logical. And when I deselect Search Entire Library it logically searches only the playlist I'm presently within. I can hasten song searching (which is what I usually search) a bit by switching to Songs, but it is still slower than the old way, and I still see beach ball flashes. And it is clumsier.

Alley_Cat wrote:

I wonder if search whole library accesses iCloud for nondownloaded content slowing it down.

My strong impression is that in my case it is "live" searching 69,627 tunes for the letter "a" (for instance) in song, artist, album, and composer, and then works to display them and their artwork, and this bogs down what used to be a simple search. Then it repeats the boondoggle with the next letter in the search, and so on.