chuckp8

Q: iTunes 12 extremely slow?

I updated to iTunes 12 before upgrading to Yosemite. I thought it was incredibly slow. I was hoping it was just because I hadn't updated to Yosemite yet.

 

I was wrong.

 

Changing from playlist to playlist, from music to movies, the name of a track... pretty much every single step I take has 2-4 seconds of lag time. Beach ball on every click.

 

Granted, I have a library that has hundreds of playlists and 150k songs at over a terabyte on an external drive, but none of that mattered yesterday when I was running iTunes 11 on OS X 10.9. I had heard that each iteration of iTunes was making it more and more difficult for users with massive libraries, but I never really noticed until now.

 

I'm planning on reaching out to iTunes, not that I expect a response, just hoping that others are doing the same and a fix could be in the works.

 

Is anyone else having this problem?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10), iTunes 12

Posted on Oct 18, 2014 9:15 AM

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Q: iTunes 12 extremely slow?

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  • by theJesse,

    theJesse theJesse Oct 29, 2014 8:36 AM in response to Gavin in Denver
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 29, 2014 8:36 AM in response to Gavin in Denver

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

  • by musicartgeek,

    musicartgeek musicartgeek Oct 29, 2014 10:03 AM in response to Gavin in Denver
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Oct 29, 2014 10:03 AM in response to Gavin in Denver

    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.

  • by Tommy2Kind,

    Tommy2Kind Tommy2Kind Oct 29, 2014 11:14 AM in response to musicartgeek
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Oct 29, 2014 11:14 AM in response to musicartgeek

    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.

  • by Reado,

    Reado Reado Oct 29, 2014 4:32 PM in response to Tommy2Kind
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Oct 29, 2014 4:32 PM in response to Tommy2Kind

    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!

  • by hyphen,

    hyphen hyphen Nov 5, 2014 1:08 PM in response to chuckp8
    Level 6 (15,489 points)
    Nov 5, 2014 1:08 PM in response to chuckp8

    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.

  • by louis1946,

    louis1946 louis1946 Nov 7, 2014 3:37 PM in response to hyphen
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 7, 2014 3:37 PM in response to hyphen

    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.

  • by wittybrit,

    wittybrit wittybrit Nov 7, 2014 4:30 PM in response to louis1946
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 7, 2014 4:30 PM in response to louis1946

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

  • by louis1946,

    louis1946 louis1946 Nov 7, 2014 6:07 PM in response to wittybrit
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 7, 2014 6:07 PM in response to wittybrit

    Glad it's useful!

  • by hilo2275,

    hilo2275 hilo2275 Nov 15, 2014 8:06 AM in response to chuckp8
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Wireless
    Nov 15, 2014 8:06 AM in response to chuckp8

    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.

  • by hilo2275,

    hilo2275 hilo2275 Nov 15, 2014 8:09 AM in response to hilo2275
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Wireless
    Nov 15, 2014 8:09 AM in response to hilo2275

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

  • by chuckp8,

    chuckp8 chuckp8 Nov 15, 2014 4:00 PM in response to hilo2275
    Level 1 (3 points)
    Nov 15, 2014 4:00 PM in response to hilo2275

    Heeeeyyy.... but Swinsian is pretty amazing. Thanks for the heads up on it. I'm going to try the 30 day free trial, but so far it's lightning fast response it working for me. ****, I can import with iTunes, use it for syncing phone and iPad, and then listen to my music on Swinsian.

     

    Loving it so far.

     

    C

  • by MichaelPerre,

    MichaelPerre MichaelPerre Nov 18, 2014 8:04 AM in response to chuckp8
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 18, 2014 8:04 AM in response to chuckp8

    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??

  • by GTibbles,

    GTibbles GTibbles Dec 21, 2014 9:03 AM in response to MichaelPerre
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 21, 2014 9:03 AM in response to MichaelPerre

    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.

  • by vsop4me,

    vsop4me vsop4me Jan 19, 2015 8:15 PM in response to GTibbles
    Level 1 (1 points)
    Jan 19, 2015 8:15 PM in response to GTibbles

    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.

  • by rssg,

    rssg rssg Jan 23, 2015 5:36 PM in response to chuckp8
    Level 1 (11 points)
    Jan 23, 2015 5:36 PM in response to chuckp8

    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.

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