Itunes not responding, running extremely slow

In order to uninstall iTunes 12.3.1, go to Finder, then click on "Applications". Go to the itunes icon and right click. Click on Get Information. Click on the lock at the bottom right and type in your system password. Then click on "everyone" and change access to "Read and Write". This will allow you to move the itunes icon to the Trash. Then empty the trash. You can now install an earlier version of itunes. I installed iTunes 12.3.044 and restarted the computer. The new (old) version of iTunes will now be installed.

iTunes seemed to be working OK after logging out before, but it did it again today and it wasn't logged in. It also tied up the external media drive the entire time it was acting up (couldn't even show a directory) and I could hear the drive head making some kind of odd noise every so often. I'm still afraid I might have a problem with the external drive here or something of that nature (drive is still making a noise every so often even after I got iTunes to close). I'm going to try downgrading to an earlier version if possible next.

I tried downgrading to 12.3.0.44 as suggested so many times in this thread and as soon as I tried to play a song, it just went to the spinning beachball. About a minute and a half later it played a few seconds of the song and then went back to the beachball. Whatever the problem is, it's not just 12.3.1 that's the problem here. I'm thinking of downgrading back to iTunes 11.4. The problem there is I have an iPod Touch Gen5 running iOS 9 and 11.4 can't sync an iOS9 device. This is a real disaster.

I spent many, many hours on the phone with Apple concerning how my iPhone wouldn't properly back up via iTunes - I kept getting a "your iPhoto library is not available" error message. I was asked to send screenshots and various diagnostic data, and was waiting for a call from "engineers" of some kind...the call never came. iTunes 12.3.1 came along, and seemingly resolved the issue, except now iTunes itself was extremely slow and unresponsive...but at least my phone would backup successfully.

Until today. I attempted to import a CD, and it literally took hours. From that moment on - likely a coincidence - I was inexplicably back to receiving the same "your iPhoto library is not available" error message.

"Frustrating" is an understatement.

Downgrading to 12.3.0.44 didn't help a thing here. It made it far far worse. I read a thread elsewhere that suggested that starting a new iTunes library and loading songs into it solved the problem and so it's probably a corruption of the library file somehow. Well, before I upgraded to El Capitan I was still using iTunes 11.4 but I had to upgrade to 12.x to update my iPod 5G to iOS9. But I backed up the old library first. So I made a copy of the 11.4 iTunes library, renamed it via the shell to "iTunes Library.itl" so iTunes could open it with the OPTION key on startup and switched to that. iTunes then "updated" it to the current version (back to 12.3.1 here) and sure enough, everything is working fine again (so far). I'm 100% certain I was using 12.3.1 for quite some time with no issues before this "corruption" set in. I'm guessing there's something happening in iTunes that corrupts the database under certain circumstances and that corruption is the real problem. I don't know what that would be, though. I don't know how long it will continue to work, but for now, this works better than trying to downgrade a corrupted library.

With all this talk of corrupted libraries, what do those of us with libraries on a network server do? I don't have enough hard drive space on my computer to copy the contents of my network server over. It's curious but when iTunes 12 first arrived, I do remember a lot of music suddenly went missing from the library so I did the 'add to library' command and ended up with a lot of duplicated tracks. Took me ages to remove the duplicates but it seemed fine until the latest version of iTunes came along which is when all the problems started.

You don't have to copy all your media files over, just the iTunes database "library" file. Mine is about 4.1MB for a library that has about 9000 songs, 600 movies and a few hundred TV Shows.

Between this problem and the instability of my new FireTV using Kodi across SMB or NFS on my Mac Mini Server (NFS used to be rock solid with my AppleTV using XBMC on the 1st Gen model) and I don't know if it's El Capitan or Kodi's fault. It fails to see the shares sometimes with ZeroConf when configuring and sometimes gives an error accessing a directory (try again and it is usually OK). It's odd; I feel like my Apple TV + PowerPC Mac Server from 2007 was more stable!

Been experiencing the same heavy slow downs in iTunes that the rest of you have, finally had a chance to experiment a bit. I believe the issue has something to do with how the latest iTunes update deals with user created playlist. Made a copy of my iTunes data folder, opened the newly created version, wiped all my playlists and closed it out. Once I reopened iTunes, the speed ramped back up to it's previous level. Imported my playlists back in, and everything slowed right back down.

Played with it some more. I have both an iPad and iPhone attached and with playlists, full startup of iTunes with devices loaded took approx 2 1/2 minutes. Startup without playlists completed in approx 15 seconds.

Thank you very much, Russell. iTunes is working perfectly now.

For me, the problem seems to be tied to my iTunes Match subscription. The small striped cloud icon always shows up towards the top right of the iTunes window in attempts to update, and it is never able to complete the process. Once I log out of iTunes, everything runs much, much faster for me, although there is still a small lag at times.

That said, I've never thought about the playlists contributing to the problem. I'll absolutely give it a try...thank you!

Exactly. You said it in a much similar way than I did. That's why it's useless to ask them. I'm getting tired of waiting for an update. I'm so angry about this. I'm really at my wits end. Itunes is the interface for my phone and pad so this really impacts everything. I'm so frustrated with this. What a nightmare.

I had (have) this problem but it slowed my computer down generally and eventually brought it to a halt. I have realised that iTunes was (is) creating incorrect permissions which is resolved by running Repair Disc Permissions in the Disk Utility. Unfortunately the errors will re-occur and so you will need to do this regularly.

Also in the iTunes menu there is provision for giving feedback (iTunes>Provide iTunes feedback). I suggest everyone should make Apple aware of the problem by using this facility. Several 1000 of such reports may make Apple sit up and take notice.

Thanks. This may have helped me a bit. Let's see...

No...still as bad as ever.