After upgrading to 12.3.1, iTunes slowed way down, the rainbow appearing with every command, every click. Support couldn't help. Any suggestions?

I'm the same now for weeks since the upgrade.... it's a total nightmare!!!! I can't even sync my phone for Halloween sound effects like I do every year!!!

Every click... every selection is beach ball and excruciatingly slow...!! iTunes is unusable as far as I'm concerned right now... hopefully 10.11.2 will be out soon... 😟

Anthony

10.11.2 didn't fix anything for me. Can't select anything in playlists. Can in "Music" only. If anything, it's worse. And the UI is hideous, flat and sterile. Ive needs to stick with hardware. I'm running many OS's and with that my favorite iTunes is v11.4, many more options and features also sounds better and far more pleasing on the eye, that will play in all the OS's (as far as Apple will let it) and now I'm getting all kinds of errors in the latter OS's. I have 12.3.1 installed on my 10.11.2 partition and the previous version was connected to a separate database just for it and when I updated and fired it up it jumped to the last used database on the machine, no where near where it's DB was stored and updated the DB for 11.4. It's as if was made to hunt down and kill it. Thank the gods that it throws a copy of the .itl file in the previous folder. Which I would not surprised if anytime soon that stops.

iTunes as was past Apple OS's used to be so free feeling and easy to use without any restrictions and tons of possibilities. Now . . .

I don't have an answer for you, but you're not alone in your frustration. Here are two multi-page threads on this issue, with misery-love-company confirmation of a problem (and unadvisable, version-downgrade "fixes" for desperate users):

Itunes not responding, running extremely slow

iTunes slow

I hope Apple fixes this yesterday.

The task of going back to 12.3 is extremely easy. Just follow instructions provided. The change is like sticking a V8 into a Vega, and then racing a 4 cylinder Pinto. It is just that much of a change.

On second thought - 12.3 iTunes = 2015 Dodge Hellcat vs. newest iTunes = Grandpa's moped. There. Perfect analogy.

I have had this problem too. I found a solution that worked for me.

I removed my iTunes library and put it in the trash so it could not be read (make sure not to delete your library by emptying the trash). I opened iTunes up to see if there was improvement in performance without my large library. iTunes opened and created a new blank library, and ran much smoother and faster. I shut down iTunes, then placed the new library in the trash, and then replaced my old library. After restarting iTunes, I went to preferences under the "Advanced" tab and selected the change button under "iTunes Media Folder Location". I reselected my library, and then a box popped up asking me if I wanted to consolidate my music. I clicked yes, and after about a 5 minute wait it finished. iTunes is now back to normal and working properly.

Not sure if you need to go through putting your library in the trash or not. This may work by simply reselecting your library again in preferences. Also, the iTunes store is still slow. I find iTunes opens faster if you make sure you are not on the iTunes store, and instead select your music library when you exit iTunes.

Hope this helps.

I am using iTunes 12.3.1.23 on a 2012 Mc Mini running OS 10.11.1

Couldn't agree more that the Apple Support people will continue to totally deny that there is ANYTHING wrong with iTunes 12.3.1 but we all know there is. Surely they are working on it but let me tell you what all this has cost me. I have/or had 49,000 plus songs in my iTunes library. When I started talking to Apple Support last week over the slowness I had not checked this forum and lord I wish I had before calling them. They had me doing so many different things and none worked but in doing so I loss for 6,000 of my songs due to something they had me try. It had to do with downloading El Capitan, pulling my iTunes Library.xml and my iTunes Library.it out on the desktop. Then had me re-download iTunes and then it's foggy as to what happen but somehow it doubled the size of my storage space on my iMac and when I left it rebuilding the library overnight - it maxed out my space and couldn't download all my music. It's gone. It screws up my TimeMachine backup drive also - so I did NOT have an older backup to restore from. Disaster does not describe how I feel.

Now I have an old iPod Classic which contains a lot of these missing songs. Isn't there a way to change it to a hard drive and download the songs to an external drive and then back into my iTunes? Seems like I recall this from many years ago but I know better than to ask Apple how to do it. But I'm asking you guys - I also have two newer iPod Touch with many of the songs. Can they be done the same way to get my songs back?? I know they don't want this to be possible because you could then share your library with someone else - heaven forbid.