04-04-2007, 02:50 PM

I have a 500 gig library of music (don't ask) and have kind of a quirky setup to make it available on my home network. It works ok, but the problem is that the size of the library seems to freak out iTunes. It takes foverer to load, freezes temporarily sometimes, permanently sometimes, works really slugishly others. Is there a size limit to the library iTunes can access properly? Anyone else dealing with a huge itunes library/have any solutions for this?

Thanks!

04-04-2007, 03:02 PM

give us some of your comptuers specs.

i bet that you are running out of ram and that itunes is bogging down because it is using up all of your ram...how do other applications run when itunes is slowing up? monitor your 'activity monitor' when using itunes for a while and see what your processor and memory usage are
-chris

04-04-2007, 03:05 PM

the specs are 1.67 ghz PPC G4. 1.5 gigs of RAM.

04-04-2007, 03:09 PM

I have the same issues at times. I have over 85,000 music tracks (600+ Gb) and over 3000 Video tracks (700=+ Gb) in iTunes. everything is spread across 7 internal and external drives, and iTunes is on my main boot drive (8th drive). It can get sluggish at times, even on the Quad G5. iTunes is not all that good with large library database files it seems.

There are several options:

1) Delete your library and rebuild it.

2) Create separate libraries for Music and Video or even Music, TV shows and Movies. Hold down Ctrl + Shift (I think) when starting iTunes and it will give the option select a library or create a new one. You can create as many as you want, but to switch between them you have to restart iTunes.

I've done option 1 and it helps a bit. Option 2 works pretty well but can get cumbersome when you want to switch between libraries.

I'm guessing that you are using a network drive so that may be part of your issue. Other than that, I don't know of any real tricks to speed up performance other than get a faster computer or reduce the overall size of the library.

04-04-2007, 03:13 PM

On my G4 Power Macs I have noticed when the iTunes library gets really large it lags a bit trying to get to it. My Video Card even made a difference when I changed from the stock GF2 to an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128 Megs. That seemed to help also when the library got really large as before the upgrade it was very jerky scrolling the library. The rest is probably CPU speed and maybe even Hard Drive speed. Try the tips also that Baggss suggested.

04-04-2007, 05:08 PM

It is a network drive but this happens even when my laptop is not connected to the network. The library file is very big, and I'm guessing that is what makes iTunes so clunky. There are very few video files in itunes. I have a library of video stuff, but I keep that separate because of this problem, I didn't want to make it worse. arg.

Originally Posted by baggss

I have the same issues at times. I have over 85,000 music tracks (600+ Gb) and over 3000 Video tracks (700=+ Gb) in iTunes. everything is spread across 7 internal and external drives, and iTunes is on my main boot drive (8th drive). It can get sluggish at times, even on the Quad G5. iTunes is not all that good with large library database files it seems.

There are several options:

1) Delete your library and rebuild it.

2) Create separate libraries for Music and Video or even Music, TV shows and Movies. Hold down Ctrl + Shift (I think) when starting iTunes and it will give the option select a library or create a new one. You can create as many as you want, but to switch between them you have to restart iTunes.

I've done option 1 and it helps a bit. Option 2 works pretty well but can get cumbersome when you want to switch between libraries.

I'm guessing that you are using a network drive so that may be part of your issue. Other than that, I don't know of any real tricks to speed up performance other than get a faster computer or reduce the overall size of the library.

04-04-2007, 05:29 PM

85,000 music tracks?

Very cool.

Isn't the library in an XML format? Probably not really that efficient.

04-04-2007, 07:44 PM

Yea the library is built on XML which is really aweful for large library usage. Hopefully with Leopard and Core Data we will see a new database system for iTunes to increase performance

04-04-2007, 09:21 PM

How do you have that much music? I have exactly 1 GB.

04-04-2007, 09:47 PM

Originally Posted by baggss

I have the same issues at times. I have over 85,000 music tracks (600+ Gb) and over 3000 Video tracks (700=+ Gb) in iTunes.

Baggs.... I envy you lol. both the op and baggs make my measly 23000+ song / 50 video library look terrible. I cant wait to someday reach 500gigs

04-05-2007, 09:50 AM

Originally Posted by Cassifire

How do you have that much music? I have exactly 1 GB.

my library is 1970 songs/files or in size terms 8.33gb or 5.2 days.

04-05-2007, 12:48 PM

I only have 1960 songs and 20 something videos.

04-05-2007, 01:35 PM

I;m running about 65 gigs (about 20 gigs of Music and 45 gigs of Video, blame Battlestar Galactica and 24..., will be even worse if Stargate SGI ever comes out from season 1).

04-06-2007, 06:28 AM

How do people get that much music? I have 12120 songs (which reminds me, I need to update my iPod), 34.7 days, 72.35GB of music no videos. All of my music is ripped in VBR MP3 -alt preset standard LAME using EAC on Windows. If I were to rip all my music into lossless then maybe I would be reaching that sort of figure for my music.

04-06-2007, 01:14 PM

I will simply say that I do not own the CDs for anywhere near all of the music in my library. No, I don't do P2P either.