iTunes 12 extremely slow?

HAhahaha. Fool. This is Apple. You can never go back!

I didn't have a time machine backup but did have Super Duper. I hate to say it, but wiped the disk, did a clean install of Mavericks, reimported email, Safari bookmarks, reinstalled office and some other apps, and had to re-add about two weeks of music and video I hadn't backed up w super duper. 3 machines. Many hours of work. Will never trust a new apple "upgrade" again.

Can't help but wonder if this inability of itunes to work with large libraries is a move to get people to that stupid cloud. I need an alternative to iTunes designed for large library management. Help.

II've found that it's not the size of the library, but the location of it. I moved my 250gb from my external HD tony iMac and now it works fine. I know this isn't an option for extremely large libraries, but it just seems like a design flaw. Maybe it's intentiona, or maybe Apple has just become incompetent. There are so many problems with Yosemite and all the "upgrades" that it just seems like the whole thing was rushed. My finder stopped working on my iMac last night and wouldn't relaunch. It turns out there was some problem with dropbox preventing finder from running, because once I quit it finder and Spotlight started working again. Never had anything like that happen before, but have come across a few people with the problem after the Yosemite "upgrade." I know one thing.;if apple doesn't fix these problems soon, they're going to loose a lot of loyal, paying customers.

Why has Apple gone to sh*t lately?! First iOS 8, now iTunes 12. The company is slowly falling apart now that Steve Jobs is no longer here.

Trying to "transfer purchases" myself and finding each time iTunes transfers a purchase, it hangs before moving on to the next purchase. I want trying to do an iOS update via iTunes but I've given up now, doing it OTA instead!

I noticed that the itunes 12 library data are stored in the "iTunes Library.itl" file. Initially, after upgrading to yosemite and itunes 12, the latter was excruciatingly slow. I moved all the .xml files to the desktop, restarted iTunes and its speed was much improved, not spectacularly but, still, improved. No playlists were altered. Upon quiting, itunes creates another file in its folder, the iTunes Music Library.xml. Hopefully it will improve with a future update. My music library is almost 4TB of aiff and apple lossless files.

iTunes 12 sync speeded up greatly when I went to the Store pane in iTunes preferences and turned off everything except Limit Ad Tracking. A lot of the other stuff, like Sync Playback Information Across Devices seems to be on by default. I also went to the Sharing pane and turned off any sharing of specific playlists. I left Share My Entire Library on, however.

Not sure what did the trick, but interminable waits to sync even a single audio track to the iPhone went away. My guess is, iTunes was thrashing around trying to sync stuff between devices, not finding them online, thrashing around more, etc. Apple does need to work this stuff out more cleanly.

YEAH LOUIS1946 - Looks like you solved this for me! Thanks --- well 15 minutes later let me change that to maybe

Glad it's useful!

Performance is excruciatingly slow. It takes over 20 seconds to process a "Create new playlist from selection" action and an additional 45 seconds or so to process any change in the playlist's title.

I'd love to switch to Swinsian or some other option but, with Swinsian, the dealbreaker was no support for simultaneous Airplay devices.

I can't understand why Apple doesn't test first! I mean every one of us find iTunes Yosemite slow - and we can't all have a "special" case. 😠

I know that Apple probably knows that there is a problem and is NOW working on it and will release a fix in a couple of months 😢. Right now though, because we all can't wait that long, does anyone know of a good iTunes alternative?? 😐

I hope Apple is reading this thread and taking action because, as many have noted, this is a terrible release of iTunes. My library is somewhat large at about 120,000 songs. The worst part for me is when plugging an iPad or iPhone into my MacBook Pro Retina's USB port. iTunes will then give me the spinning beachball for a minimum of 10 minutes and as many as 20, stopping any iTunes playback in progress (though, interestingly, it occasionally comes up for air for a second and moves on to the next song before beachballing again.

I thought maybe the problem has something to do with sending Genius data to Apple or to/from the attached device. But I turned that off and it made no difference whatsoever. It's like this product wasn't even tested.

Ditto to all the complaints. I have given up on iTunes 12, including 11 as both got progressively slower. I gave up Yosemite as well, back to old school 10, keeping only my mac mini on latest to allow for synch with iPhones and iPad on IOS8, other than that I would not have kept Yosemite or iTunes 12. Terrible. This is the worst I have seen from apple OSX and software.

Same problem here when importing my collection of CD's, I'm facing the frequent beach ball problem after importing just 150 CD's.

I have a lot more music to manage, and am deciding between downgrading or just chucking it all and just going back to MediaMonkey on windows.

Worst iTunes ever.