Q: Just updated to iTunes 12.2.1 for mac and found that it is extremely slow - is anyone else having this issue?

I found that after "updating" iTunes from the App Store that iTunes did not actually update and I had to go through the procedure again. Make sure that iTunes actually shows that it is version 12.2.2. I see now that this version can be downloaded from the Apple site and through MacUpdate.

I have been having this problem for a while. Every time I try to edit something, I get the spinning ball, including trying to delete something. Importing there seems to be no problem. Just updated this morning to 12.2.2.25 and it's still there. Very annoying and frustrating.

Further problems with iTunes:

1. Cover art mysteries - wherever there is a track with no tags (I have a lot), the cover art defaults to Bjork's, Selmasongs cover or a .pdf of a restaurant menu I have in my documents folder. I went to the Bjork album and entered all the tags to see if that would correct the problem but, instead, the Bjork album was changed to something completely different. I have to live with these incorrect cover art banners at the top it seems because there is no way of minimising that bar or deleting it.

2. Whenever I switch from the store or "my music" back to playlists, I go back to the playlist I was in but I have to scroll down to it's position again in the list from the top. The main window shows the playlist but the lists to the left revert to the top again. When you factor in all the ball spinning in between actions, that can be very time consuming and frustrating.

This version of iTunes is getting buggier by the day. All we need is some smart entrepreneur to come up with a viable alternative to iTunes and people will be all over it.

I've been having a lot of beach balling and frustration with iTunes 12. I remember reading a while back that having too many playlists can cause performance problems in iTunes. So today I decided to get rid of some. I don't know how many I deleted but I've been making new ones occasionally since 2001 and rarely deleting them. I got it down to about 50 or 60. My problems are over. Fast as can be. No matter what I do in iTunes. Hope this helps someone. The improvement was dramatic.

So what are you doing about the deleted playlists, simply doing without? And were the playlists of files you had on your computer or on external drives or in the cloud?

The vast majority of those playlists hadn't been played in years. I think I'll be fine with far less than I had. These days I usually make playlists that go 20 hours or so and don't need that many. All my music files are on the internal drive and backed up many other places.

Thanks.

Thank you, g4s, this is extremely helpful to know.

I've got around 14000.

Chris, I've got about 70,000. I try to be a little bit restrained about playlists, but I've still got about 40 or 50 smart playlists (which suck up processing power because they get updated when changes happen in the library), running on an aged iMac. For me, the slowdown problem was cured by a clean installation of iTunes from the Apple Downloads site. But that hasn't worked for other folks in this thread.

Isn't it astounding that Apple can't get this program to work properly? Apple has become one of the largest and greediest companies in the world. Its sad that they can't take the time or have the decency to address and fix this problem. I've lost count at how many computers, iPhones, iPads, software, etc. I have purchased from this company. If they showed even a small percentage of the loyalty and support that their customers show them, this issue would have been addressed.

It has been suggested that the problem lies in having too many playlists. That is not true. I just recently upgraded my operating system from 10.7.5 to Yosemite. The old version worked fine with my large playlist. It is very slow with the new version. Ergo, the problem lies with iTunes. I hope Apple is working hard to fix this problem.

Hi Scoogy2 - I can confirm this is the case too.  I had this issue on my MacBookPro laptop which is a small (2362 songs to be exact) with 10 or so playlists, I didn't have the same issue on my MacPro with >300Gb of songs and a larger number of playlists (circa 200+).

My 'fix' was to delete the iTunes library files (see earlier in this thread) and start again IE re-scan my music files, since then it has been behaving itself just fine.

I'm guessing that it was a case that the iTunes library files got corrupted during the v12 upgrade.  Unless the corruption is consistent from one user to another, I'm not sure if Apple can/will do a patch... just my thoughts, don't shoot me!

oh - if anyone from Apple is actually looking at this thread I can get the files back from TimeMachine if you like andI have a sample of the process during one of these high CPU event.

Again, I know the fix i used is a problem for those out there who have large playlists/ratings etc but for me it worked as I was 'happy' to lose these in return for my machine back.

After talking to an Apple Care representative and trying a bunch of stuff over the phone which did not solve the problem, I have realised that one of my playlists contained a huge number of items. My Library contains about 10 thousand songs, but this playlist contains over 250 thousand songs somehow. I did not go through it, but it must have contained a lot of duplicates obviously. Anyway, I deleted that playlist and all the issues with iCloud/iTunes vanished. What I think happened was that every time I was doing a change that triggered iTunes to sync with iCloud the syncing a playlist with that many items would just take a whole lot of time.

I did create that playlist myself, but I never added that many songs to it and whenever I added songs I chose to skip duplicates. So I cannot explain how that playlist ended up being so huge.

A week or two later, after I had deleted the playlist and had no more problems with iTunes, the issues started once again. When I looked to the playlist section, the huge playlist that I had deleted earlier, was there again! That was really strange. I deleted it again and my problems are now gone for good. It has been almost a month since I have deleted the playlist a second time and it did not show up in my library again.

In the meantime iTunes has been upgraded to version 12.3 and I am using El Capitan as well. I hope these problems never come back.

Tip: although the guy from Apple Care was really helpful he was hearing about this issue for the first time. He had no idea there are complaints on the Apple Forums regarding such an issue. The point is to use the feedback form (http://www.apple.com/feedback/) to tell them about these issues to increase the chance of having them fixed sooner.