iTunes Alpha disorder?!, Ank before Ana?

The size of your library will certainly slow things down. If you have any smart playlists all 100,000+ tracks will be re-evaluated for membership of those playlists each time you make a change to the database. The more lists you have the slower it will get. If your library files are stored on an external or NAS drive that will also incur a performance hit.

I don't see any oddities with sorting in my library, and in particular none with Artists, Albums or Songs that begin An. Could the issue be explained by a rogue sort value?

tt2

There are some oddities in the sort order in Artists view - these appeared in 12.2 and were not fixed by 12.2.1. These two screenshots show what's happening:

where the expected order is Assembly of Dust, The Associates ("The" automatically suppressed), Aswad, Average White Band, and:

where it should be listed as Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Bad Company, Angelo Badalamenti (Sort Artist set to "Badalamenti, Angelo), Philip Bailey ("Bailey, Philip"), The Band, The Band of Heathens, The Bangles, Barclay James Harvest. I have reported the issue, using these examples, using the Feedback pages.

Follow-up ... the other issue related to performance when editing seems associated with iTunes having high processor usage as soon as a Get Info window is opened. Again, this started in 12.2 and continues in 12.2.1. Task Manager illustrates this:

1. Get Info window opened, no further actions
2. Get Info window closed
3. Get Info window opened, metadata edited (very little different, so looks like its not the actual edits that are the problem)
4. Get Info window closed

This is from a Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit machine using an Intel Core Duo E6550 @ 2.33GHz. Same symptoms observed after updating to Windows 10, and also repeatable on 64-bit machines under both Windows 7 and 8.1. The output show above was produced with nothing but iTunes (and the usual background processes) running; with other processor-intensive applications running at the same time opening the Get Info window can cause CPU usage to "flatline" at 100%, with obvious effects on performance. I've not noticed anything as sluggish as the behavior that Spike reports - just enough degradation to be annoying.

I note that there are reports of similar issues over on the iTunes for Mac forum, suggesting that this isn't a Windows-specific problem.

Aha, a view I never really use. And boy what a mess it is for me too! 😕😮

tt2

Likewise - I only used that view to check and confirm the issue when someone else reported it here. I'm sure there's some kind of pattern in the misplaced sorting, but I've not been able (or, more accurately, not spent much time trying) to see exactly what's going on.

I don't use any of iTunes' "add-on" features (Genius, Match, iCloud, Apple Music, ,,,) so I'm confident that this is a core program issue, not a direct side-effect of any of these.

I had the same problem with artists not being sorted properly by name; the latest iTunes update (12.2.2) has fixed this.

Confirmed 🙂

How are you adding music? I find that 2-3 minutes is typical, but I assume that's due to the size of my iTunes library, the location of the iTunes library (external drive), and the fact that the way I have my system setup digital downloads from Amazon, etc. go to a second external drive. Still faster than importing from a CD 🙂.