iTunes 12.2 very slow - beach ball spinning all the time

I'm having an identical "beach ball" problem, although it only occurs when I am editing a song's info. And I typically have to switch to another program in order for the beach ball to disappear. If I don't, the beach ball stays perpetually.

I have been experiencing the same extremely painful process since I updated to Yosemite 10.10.4 and iTunes 12.2. My iTunes library has been basically rendered useless. Every command, no matter how simple, brings up the spinning wheel, which hangs the program and have to force quit. Can't even play two songs in a row without this happening! I'm using a 2012 Mac Mini with plenty of memory, so this should not be happening. As a matter of fact I have to say that this is the first time I have a problem with my Mac. It has been running quite reliably for the last three years without any major issues... until last week, that is.

After much playing around with this awful new version of iTunes, I think I got a breakthrough: I was able to reduce the amount of times that iTunes hangs with the spinning wheel of heck. Mind you, this did NOT stop it, but it reduced it. It still happens, just less so.

This is what I did:

Go to PREFERENCES > GENERAL tab

Disable "Show Apple Music"

Then go to PREFERENCES > PARENTAL tab

Disable Podcasts

Disable Internet Radio

Disable iTunes Store (yes, don't be afraid to do this)

Disable Allow access to iTunes U

Click OK

Close iTunes 12.2 and then restart it again: after making those changes to the preferences, iTunes plays my media collection without hanging on any command for a solid 15 minutes. Then I will get the spinning wheel for about 30 seconds, but it won't freeze, it will come back and keep playing. While I can't access the store while they work on a fix to this doomed 12.2 release, at least I have my music collection back, just 15 minutes at a time. 😐

This leads me to think that iTunes 12.2 is unnecessarily checking with the store/cloud every time you try to play one of your media files, often just hanging or freezing. It would explain the reports of people getting their own media files modified by Apple with DRM without their consent.

Seriously, Apple, what a friggin' mess!

Let me know if making these modifications to the preferences worked for any of you as well.

Hi all,

I am having the same problem as '_duppy_', however my iTunes library only contains 32k songs as opposed to the 50k they have and is still locking up after every single click or play of a new song. Every time a different song is played, my iTunes library locks up anywhere between 10 and 15 seconds before it comes good again, and I can't do anything except watch the beautiful rainbow wheel spin around.

Navigating tabs or trying to change views such as albums to artists or playlists also results in a >30 second freeze time.

- 'Juliator', I have tried what you have suggested and unfortunately this doesn't resolve the issue for me. I never had these issues with iTunes 11.4, only since updating it to iTunes 12.2. I'm running a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5 (Late 2013) and 8GB RAM, on OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks, not Yosemite.

Any help would be appreciated. I am considering reverting back to iTunes 11.4 until these issues are fixed.

Same problem here. I was a very happy iTunes user until they updated it to version 12.2. The application stalls for minutes at the time while all you're doing is import an mp3, a cd, update the info of a song, etc. Last night I imported 10 mp3s, this took 1,5 hours! Shutting off Radio, Match, Genius, all didn't work.

Today I started to import a couple of cd's I still had laying around. And what I noticed is that when you just leave the screen untouched, there is no problem. The minute you check to see what is in your library, you're screwed and the beach ball appears again.

Then I also noticed something which didn't catch my eye at first. Many artists now have a biography attached and similar artists are shown also. This is the root of all evil, people! The minute you go into an artist on your library, iTunes starts to download crap from the Store. It appears to be doing this for your entire library all the time.

Apart from the fact that I don't need this feature, Apple should provide a way to turn off this ridiculous form of advertising.

Thanks Juliator, this solution solved the issue for me. Took me about 20 mins to mark all the checkboxes and click ok, right after that some pop-up told me iTunes could not check something with my iPhone purchases, but right away iTunes was working as a charm.

No did not work for me... 😢

I was having the same problem and found the problem and solution. When I added music to my iTunes library it was creating a playlist for every single album, but all the playlists were empty. I have several hundred albums, so I had several hundred empty playlists. I never use playlists, so I never noticed them.

It was just a matter of deleting all those empty playlists, now iTunes is very fast .. clicking the star menu, etc is instant.. no more spinning beach ball.

Of course, iTunes makes it nearly impossible to delete playlists .. you can't multi-select and delete .. you can only delete one at a time. (really Apple?)

Googling lead me to a script which seemed like overkill. I fired up Automator and was pleased to find a "Remove Empty Playlists" task under Music. Apparently this is a big enough issue that someone at Apple wrote an automator task to "fix" it. Ugh. Why not just add multi-select delete in iTunes?

Anyway.. I had to put a "Find iTunes Items" (for playlists) before that task as its input, then ran it .. 3 minutes later iTunes playlists are all cleaned up and it's running great.

They want to you stop using your HD and just use the cloud. All part of the new way. They want it all.

Guys,

It took Apple almost a year to pull their finger out but this issue has finally been fixed.

Update to iTunes 12.3.2.35 and there is no more freezing..

Yup. Sure was a long time. Next time they mess up, we have the work arounds. Apple trains us to do without them.

I had something similar to this with iTunes 12.4.3.1and no clue how it happened. I ran TechTools Pro 8 and did a Volume Rebuild adn the spinning beach ball went away.

I suspect that when this happened with iTunes that the Volume directory has gotten corrupted and the best way to fix the issue is to rebuild it. Back in the old day you could easily do with without some 3rd party utility but these days if there is still a way of rebuilding a Volume directory I have no clue on how it is done vial what Apple gives you.