John McDonough

Q: What is com.apple.MediaLibraryService?

I just upgraded to Mavericks and iTunes 11.1.2.  A few other quick notes on my setup:

 

  • I wirelessly sync to my iPhone 4S running iOS7.
  • My iTunes and iPhoto libraries are located on a remote disk that I am connected to wirelessly.  My router is a Time Capsule with a Lacie HD hooked up to it.  The Lacie is where the iTunes and iPhoto LIbraries are located.

 

First, everything seems to work fine.  There is one thing that I noticed though, when I am listening to iTunes internet radio (WXPN or Radio Paradise), I notice that this app (com.apple.MediaLIbraryService) keeps running in the background.  It is a drain on the CPU and battery and I notice that my Lacie HD is always spinning.  Before the upgrade, the drive would sleep, even while I was listening to internet radio on iTunes because I was not accessing any files.

 

The app does disappear when I shut down iTunes.

 

What is the app doing and how can I stop it from being a CPU and battery drain, along with stop spinning up the Lacie HD?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

John Mc

MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Nov 2, 2013 7:32 AM

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Q: What is com.apple.MediaLibraryService?

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  • by edzHelp,

    edzHelp edzHelp Feb 25, 2014 3:08 PM in response to Kahss
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Feb 25, 2014 3:08 PM in response to Kahss

    @Kahss, nice tip for the workaround.

     

    To all, seems the service is behaving now with 10.9.2 update. Here's what I see now:

     

    Pages:     service is consistently at 460.5MB RAM usage

    Numbers:service is consistently at 468.0MB RAM usage (after maxing out at 589.4MB)

    Keynote:  service is consistently at 468.1MB RAM usage (after maxing out at 610.0MB)

    iTunes:*    service is consistently at 300.1MB RAM usage

    *iTunes Photo Sharing w/ATV turned on and sharing photos from iPhoto.

     

    Hopefully, 10.9.2 helps you all out.

     


  • by tim_r_66,

    tim_r_66 tim_r_66 Feb 26, 2014 5:07 AM in response to edzHelp
    Level 1 (50 points)
    Feb 26, 2014 5:07 AM in response to edzHelp

    I may be seeing a small improvement but not really to declare success. I've only tested with Pages so far, and com.apple.MediaLibrary.Service still goes to the top of the list for hogging memore and CPU. However, Pages now properly shows iPhoto and iTunes content in the media browser. Still doesn't seem to cache the photos; not sure if it that is designed behavior.

  • by Johannes Lietz,

    Johannes Lietz Johannes Lietz Mar 2, 2014 12:43 PM in response to John McDonough
    Level 1 (30 points)
    Mar 2, 2014 12:43 PM in response to John McDonough

    The upgrade to OSX 10.9.2 had added the stupid iLMBAperturePlugin2012 plugin again and com.apple.MediaLibraryService was at 99% again. => moved to the trash once more...

    Bildschirmfoto 2014-03-02 um 21.38.02.png

  • by Walther Schoonenberg,

    Walther Schoonenberg Walther Schoonenberg Mar 3, 2014 1:14 AM in response to Johannes Lietz
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Mar 3, 2014 1:14 AM in response to Johannes Lietz

    Does anyone know what the Aperture plugin does? Do we need it? If we don't need it, we can trash it. What is the use of this plugin? Before the 10.9.2 update I trashed all of the plugins and I have noticed any loss of functionality of my system.

  • by Johannes Lietz,

    Johannes Lietz Johannes Lietz Mar 3, 2014 1:29 AM in response to Walther Schoonenberg
    Level 1 (30 points)
    Mar 3, 2014 1:29 AM in response to Walther Schoonenberg

    I don't know, I can just guess: It provides 'Aperture' image contents for insertion into iLife applications such as Pages. Currently when I click the media button in a Pages document, there is just a spinning 'loading' symbol in the photo tab, while the music tab is filled with songs from the iTunes library. You can still drag'n'drop images into Pages documents, though.

     

    Until Apple fixes the problem, I guess that is your tradeoff. But I'd recomment to analyze the com.apple.MediaLibraryService in the Activity Viewer first, before you trash anything. Maybe that problem with the iLMBAperturePlugin2012 is just with me and yours is different.

  • by Steve Cooper,

    Steve Cooper Steve Cooper May 13, 2014 4:56 PM in response to Johannes Lietz
    Level 2 (166 points)
    May 13, 2014 4:56 PM in response to Johannes Lietz

    Your suggestion has proved successful for me .

    Since I removed the iLMBAperturePlugin2012.ilmbplugin I haven't experienced the problem again.

     

    I have subsequently checked the function in Aperture that links it with iPhoto, since this seemed to be one most likely to be affected by the plugin, but no problem is observed. [Does anyone know what this plugin actually does?]

     

    Note that I have my Aperture library on a second partition of my startup drive -- no NAS involved.

    Also, iTunes was NOT running when I first observed the problem ( quite accidentally -- I was not researching any particular performance problem) or at any time during problem-solving attempts.

    Also, no iWork application was running.

  • by Chris 1976,

    Chris 1976 Chris 1976 May 30, 2014 12:05 PM in response to Johannes Lietz
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 30, 2014 12:05 PM in response to Johannes Lietz

    This did the trick for me as well.

    I have a huge Aperture Library. After moving iLMBAperturePlugin2012.ilmbplugin into a backup folder the insert media function once again displays Aperture content after a very reasonable few seconds. No excessive CPU utilization: com.MediaLibraryService had gone crazy before, now it calms disappears after a few seconds.

     

    I left iLMBAperturePlugin.ilmbplugin in the folder /Library/Application Support/iLifeMediaBrowser/Plug-Ins and it seems that this is good enough for inserting media into Pages. It seems that also iLMBAperture31Plugin.ilmbplugin is not needed for inserting Aperture media.

     

    Maybe older / conflicting plugin versions create the mess. In any case something that needs to be taken care of by Apple.

  • by Walther Schoonenberg,

    Walther Schoonenberg Walther Schoonenberg Jun 17, 2014 5:38 AM in response to Chris 1976
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 17, 2014 5:38 AM in response to Chris 1976

    For the record: my problems are completely solved by formatting my hard disk and reinstalling Mavericks from Time machine backup. After that my MacBook is fast and has no performance problems anymore. I it is not necessary to remove any plugin.

  • by William Fiveash,

    William Fiveash William Fiveash Dec 3, 2014 12:15 PM in response to edzHelp
    Level 1 (93 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 3, 2014 12:15 PM in response to edzHelp

    What I recently observed running Yosemite is that if iTunes has not connected with my iPhone then the com.apple.MediaLibraryService will not start and thus there is no excessive CPU consumption when iTunes is playing music.  Once I connect my iPhone either via USB or WiFi then com.apple.MediaLibraryService will start consuming a lot of CPU for several seconds every time a new song plays.  Annoying to say the least.

     

    Note, once iTunes has seen the iPhone I found I have to eject the iPhone then restart iTunes in order to prevent com.apple.MediaLibraryService from running.

  • by mikelach2,

    mikelach2 mikelach2 Dec 15, 2014 2:37 PM in response to William Fiveash
    Level 1 (5 points)
    iTunes
    Dec 15, 2014 2:37 PM in response to William Fiveash

    Running 10.10.2 with a big iTunes library, and I'm getting lots of CPU activity on com.apple.MediaLibraryService. Disabling the plug-ins helped, but this is clearly a bug that needs fixing.

  • by mikelach2,

    mikelach2 mikelach2 Dec 15, 2014 2:38 PM in response to edzHelp
    Level 1 (5 points)
    iTunes
    Dec 15, 2014 2:38 PM in response to edzHelp

    This worked for me, but remains a bug that should be fixed.

  • by jdtedrick,

    jdtedrick jdtedrick Dec 27, 2014 9:05 PM in response to John McDonough
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 27, 2014 9:05 PM in response to John McDonough

    I found that I had this problem, also.  I traced it to corrupt face.db and face_blob.db files in iPhoto that iTunes attempts to access in order for you to select photos to sync with your devices.  The files are located at

    /Users/{your user name}/Pictures/iPhoto Library/face.db

    /Users/{your username}/Pictures/iPhoto Library/face_blob.db

    I suspect it could be caused by any of the iPhoto databases if they get corrupted.

    Losing your face.db is very unfortunate if you have spent a great deal of time identifying folks in your photo library.  My faces in iPhoto had been broken for some time, and I failed to address it as soon as I noticed it.  So, I did not attempt to recover the file from my time capsule, but it should be possible.

    This is how I fixed my problem. First, I closed all programs, especially iPhoto and iTunes.  Then, I opened a terminal window and [cd  "/Users/{your user name}/Pictures/iPhoto Library" ] (need quotes around directory with spaces in their names.)  Then I renamed (actually moved) the old files

    "mv face.db old_face.db" and "mv face_blob.db old_face_blob.db"

    Next, I started iPhoto.  Once started, it begins to build the faces database by first finding all the faces in all your photos.  This can take a very long time (several hours).  I just changed my power setting to never sleep and never put the hard drive to sleep, and walked away.  After I returned, iPhoto was done, so I closed it and started iTunes.  Watched Activity Monitor and problem did not return.  Connected my iPhone and selected about 600 pictures to transfer from iPhoto to my phone using iTunes.  Sync'd.  No problems.  com.apple.MediaLibraryService stays at zero cpu usage most of the time.  Never more than about 20% at peak.

    I noticed that the new face databases were larger than the old (10% and 37%).  So now I get to "re-find" all my friend and family.  Something to do.

  • by jdtedrick,

    jdtedrick jdtedrick Dec 27, 2014 9:45 PM in response to jdtedrick
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 27, 2014 9:45 PM in response to jdtedrick

    Further to my original post. 

     

    You might want to try the repair utilities for iPhoto before you attempt what I posted earlier. 

     

    iPhoto 6 and later: Rebuilding the iPhoto library - Apple Support

     

    Close iTunes before you start the repair. 

  • by Joseph365,

    Joseph365 Joseph365 Mar 17, 2015 9:16 PM in response to jdtedrick
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Mar 17, 2015 9:16 PM in response to jdtedrick

    This seems to have worked for me. I had been toggling between Aperture and iPhoto a lot while creating a movie in iMovie. At some point, I noticed this service was hung up under Force Quit Applications. This seems to have stopped after using the Rebuild Database feature in iPhoto.

     

    OS X Yosemite 10.10.2

    iPhoto 9.6

    Aperture 3.6

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