iTunes 12 extremely slow?

This worked great, just a bit more on "If the little check-box for "Read-only" is still "lit-up," that means there might be a problem folder or file in there somewhere that still needs to be fixed. Look at each of your folders in your media folder to see if it has a lock icon on it."; All I did was uncheck this box and hit "OK", it ran through all the sub folders for me.

Things are working great now.. Before this it would take 30-45 minutes to import an album via drag and drop, not it takes just a minute or so.. And I have a large library - over 2TB.

THANK YOU!

I can't see why this would be the problem of iTunes running slow. I have the same iTunes library on my Mac Pro tower running 12.2 iTunes and very slow.

The identical library on my Mac Pro Laptop running 12.1 (I didn't upgrade to 12.2) is running normal and with no problems.

This is a problem Apple needs to address and the sooner the better. I don't know why they didn't put this music streaming service as a stand alone app and not integrate it into iTunes. I don't know about anyone else but I will NEVER use it.

iTunes 12.2 really lags even in OS X 10.11.

It really need Metal implantation to work well.

No solutions to add - just to to echo what others are finding. I just came back from two weeks' holiday to find that it's excruiciatingly slow to do anything now: import, change artwork, anything!

I'm also looking for decent iTunes alternatives. I'm fed up of ever crapper "updates".

This sorted out my problems with Apple Music playlists instantly. Thanks!!

I think I will give up on iTunes. The performance is now PATHETIC. It hogs the CPU and is not disk bound. I was able to confirm this via Activity Monitor/iStat Menus (as well as iostat/top). Further, I say it hogs the CPU because it doesn't bother to use the other cores much. From what I can tell, it does all it's processing on no more than two cores. I have a hexicore Mac Pro with 3.33 GHz of power and 24GB of RAM. If it can't run well on *this* system, it's crapware.

Adios, iTunes.

Apple, I wish you would take the *billions* of dollars in profit and apply it to developing decent software.

This is a fix for iTunes. If you are importing anything in future you must select SONGS from the drop down on the top right of your iTunes. Do all your importing and info changes while you have songs selected and you will have fast operation. When all your tracks and info is finished then you can go back to ARTISTS or ALBUMS. This works 100%.

The issues was Windows permissions. It wasn't allowing changes to be made to the files since it did not have sufficient permissions.

I've had the same problem. I'm not particularly tech savvy, but I figure it has something to do with the new "Connect" function. It seems that any addition/deletion/change you make to your library sends the info to the Apple servers as data collection. I found an option in the "Preferences" under "Store" that has a check box to "Share details about your library with Apple." I unchecked that box and it seems to have improved operation speed quite a bit. Hope that helps!

ITUNES 12 is very slow when editing album tracks, I normally edit in artist view, but switching to song view made editing very snappy.

Good tip!

Hi Everyone,

Using OS X 10.7.5

I don’t visit the forums that much. And, I’m usually the last one to update to the latest version of software because it just seem things can get worse. Well, accidentally hitting the iTunes update button - here I am.

Here’s what I discovered for what seems to be putting me in the right direction to resolving this issue

It’s related to this file in your Home>Music>iTunes folder: iTunes Library.itl

This may not surprise you but let me share what I did to determine this, and what I'm doing now.

My music library is about 500gigs. I have hundreds of playlists too. Both the playlists and iTunes preference settings are stored in the file, iTunes Library.itl

As a test, I quit iTunes, moved the iTunes Library.itl file somewhere outside the folder. Relaunched iTunes which of course makes a new file without my music/playlist - to be expected. But immediately, iTunes was faster. No more delays.

My decision going forward is to rebuild my library. In my case this is a good opportunity for me to clean things up and delete music I don’t want to add back in. And, to make sure I have Tags for everything. Chipping away at this process will take a couple of months on and off - during the weekend (no rush). I have 250 gigs back already and it remains very fast. I'm hoping it remains this way when I finish.

In my case my original library was several years old so who knows if the iTunes updates for whatever reason changed something and made it difficult to read/write to the .itl file.

I have not found any alternative solutions posted elsewhere and figure, I would at least be on my way to resolving the issue by rebuilding my library by the time I find a better solution. But maybe there isn't one.

The file rebuild test I explained above is simple and, you can easily restore your original file back.

J

So thanks to Tim Cook and his engineers finally you know how to spend your weekends for the next two months.

Quite an achievement! Thanks Apple 😉

p.s.: after last update ITunes on my MacPro is quite unusable. So I started using Vox. After all what I want is to listen to my music, not spend months looking for a solution.

"This is a fix for iTunes. If you are importing anything in future you must select SONGS from the drop down on the top right of your iTunes. Do all your importing and info changes while you have songs selected and you will have fast operation. When all your tracks and info is finished then you can go back to ARTISTS or ALBUMS. This works 100%."

Yes that is the answer beagledog48 !!!

I'm with you here.

I have around 11k tunes & this iTunes (Currently 10.11) is terrible. Hardware issue? Nope, I have a 5k iMac (6 months old), of course that comes with the whole fusion drive thing so boot up is a flash & there's 16gb ram in here with no other applications running (Aside from background things as we all have).

Fire up iTunes & wait for the beach ball to stop whirring. 20-30 seconds later, select a track. The tune starts straight away, fine. But the beach ball starts again for 5-10 seconds. Not fun when I'm flicking down my playlists. There's no play a bit & move on.

It seems like all tasks in the background of Tunes take priority over the user input. Completely backwards. I know that Apple will be capturing what I'm playing, storing it somewhere & perhaps cross checking that with some database somewhere, but that should all happen silently in the background, not take over & hand control back to me once they're done.

Not happy with this one bit.

THX a lot for this hint! iTunes made me crazy, since only renaming a song needed many minutes of beachballing. After switching from ALBUM-View to SONG-View it works fine. (Running El Capitan on a 2010 MacMini and keeping the database of more than 100k lossless files on an external USB2-drive).

And: Disaster performance on Apple side!

Things like this should not happen in properly written software.