EXTREMELY Slow iTunes Importing

teb1034 · Nov 21, 2006

Hello All...

I'm a 2 month new mac user and so far so great! However, when importing CD's into iTunes, I find myself devising plans to kill myself. Usually I manage around 4x (if I'm lucky) and it takes some CD's over a half-hour to import.

I'm using a MBP Core Duo 2.16 - encoding with AAC 128 (tried MP3, just as slow if not slower it seems). My library is split between an external HD and my MBP and is currently 43 GB.

I love my MBP, but this is a HUGE problem for me... please help!!

Thanks,
teb1034

sixslinger · Nov 21, 2006

how much RAM do you have? Also, how many other programs are running at the same time. If you have 512MB, and you have a good number of programs running (arrows underneath the icons in the dock), then this could be slowing you down.

teb1034 · Nov 21, 2006

Ram

1 GIG RAM

I've tried on a fresh restart, with no programs running - no change. I can get the same results from having 6 programs open or 0. Same lame result. Any suggestions?

sixslinger · Nov 21, 2006

try encoding at 192 kb/s. Since it is closer to original state, it should be a bit faster.

sixslinger · Nov 21, 2006

also....make sure "error correction" is off.....this may be what is slowing your down.

caribiner23 · Nov 21, 2006

Is the destination drive for the ripped files your internal or external drive?

If it's the external drive, is it USB or Firewire?

teb1034 · Nov 21, 2006

caribiner23 said:
Is the destination drive for the ripped files your internal or external drive?

If it's the external drive, is it USB or Firewire?

Destination drive is MBP... external isn't even connected when I import. (And it's USB)

dtravis7 · Nov 21, 2006

Don't know for sure if this is the problem but I have noticed that the very thin CDROM/DVD drives seem a lot slower than the normal desktop drives. Even my iMac G5's CD/DVD drive is slower at ripping/copying than any modern full sized optical drive in my PC's or Desktop Macs. That might be causing some of the slow performance. Not all Optical drives are that great at ripping. I at one time did tests on maybe 40 different but new CDROM drives and the ripping speed varied widely.

Yours if it's really getting 4x sounds a bit slow to me though. Even my iBook is faster than that. Is it 4x all the way through the CD or just at the beginning?

teb1034 · Nov 21, 2006

dtravis7 said:
Don't know for sure if this is the problem but I have noticed that the very thin CDROM/DVD drives seem a lot slower than the normal desktop drives. Even my iMac G5's CD/DVD drive is slower at ripping/copying than any modern full sized optical drive in my PC's or Desktop Macs. That might be causing some of the slow performance. Not all Optical drives are that great at ripping. I at one time did tests on maybe 40 different but new CDROM drives and the ripping speed varied widely.

Yours if it's really getting 4x sounds a bit slow to me though. Even my iBook is faster than that. Is it 4x all the way through the CD or just at the beginning?

I'm thinking something might be wrong with my drive. 4x is painstaking slow... and 4x is usually the BEST I can get... so 4x is the fastest I've seen it go and it usually ends up importing lower, around 3x.

dtravis7 · Nov 21, 2006

That might be it as that is slower than anything I have here. My iBook does at least 12x or more after the first couple of tracks. My iMac G5 gets up to around 20x toward the end of the CD.

jo5ephedward5 · Nov 22, 2006

have you tried importing when connected to the mains - or changing the performance levels for battery etc - my MacBook had the same issue and then when i changed this to maximum i was getting much better speeds

teb1034 · Nov 22, 2006

jo5ephedward5 said:
have you tried importing when connected to the mains - or changing the performance levels for battery etc - my MacBook had the same issue and then when i changed this to maximum i was getting much better speeds

I'm a relatively new mac user, and not familiar with this. How can I try that?

jo5ephedward5 · Nov 22, 2006

teb1034 said:
I'm a relatively new mac user, and not familiar with this. How can I try that?

go to user settings, and under Options in System Preferences then go Energy Saver and make the appropriate adjustments in the Processor Performance

basically select better performance for power adaptor and battery then try importing and see if there is a difference - if not i'd contact Apple

teb1034 · Nov 24, 2006

More problems?

Ok, so I've tried all the suggestions above and still no dice. Perhaps this is a related problem - I burned a few videos onto a CD using a different computer and tried to copy them to my MBP HD. To copy from CD to HD, 700 MB took over 20 minutes.

I'm guessing... I need to contact Apple? What's the best way to do this (aside from going into the store)? Ugh.

Signed,
Your previously satisfied Mac friend...

teb1034 · Nov 25, 2006

teb1034 said:
Ok, so I've tried all the suggestions above and still no dice. Perhaps this is a related problem - I burned a few videos onto a CD using a different computer and tried to copy them to my MBP HD. To copy from CD to HD, 700 MB took over 20 minutes.
QUOTE]

After posting this, I began to ask myself - it is NOT normal for a CD copy of 700 MB to take longer than 20 minutes, right? 2 divx AVI files direct from CD-ROM to MBP HD.

BTW, this is a Core Duo MBP 2.16 ghz, standard factory model from Apple Store.

xstep · Nov 25, 2006

teb1034 said:
... I began to ask myself - it is NOT normal for a CD copy of 700 MB to take longer than 20 minutes, right? 2 divx AVI files direct from CD-ROM to MBP HD.

I did a test on the same machine. A 581MB audio CD took about 14.5 miniutes to copy to a folder and for iTunes to import. So it would seem the CD/DVD drive is slow compared to full size desktops. I do expect less performance for a very thin laptop drive, but that seems a bit nasty. I as using the battery at the time of my test.

jo5ephedward5 · Nov 26, 2006

what speed is your hard drive?

it shound like its the Hard drive slowing up the storing / relese of the files to me?

if its a slow one it may hold you back - tho 700mb in over 20mins is seriously slow - i'd take it to Apple and show them whats its doing and how long it takes etc!

teb1034 · Nov 26, 2006

xstep said:
I did a test on the same machine. A 581MB audio CD took about 14.5 miniutes to copy to a folder and for iTunes to import. So it would seem the CD/DVD drive is slow compared to full size desktops. I do expect less performance for a very thin laptop drive, but that seems a bit nasty. I as using the battery at the time of my test.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's JUST me. But fortunately, I am not alone. I don't have my MBP with me right now, but the HD is factory as-is from the store... I think it's 5400 RPM's. I don't think it's an HD issue... I mean it took 3 minutes to burn the 700MB disk on the PC. What the heck...

xstep · Nov 27, 2006

It is not the hard drive. Even a 4800rpm drive has better performance than 700MB in 20 minutes. Else you couldn't import video over firewire which is about 13GB per hour of video, or about 4.3GB for 20 minutes of video.

xstep · Nov 27, 2006

teb1034 said:
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's JUST me. ... What the heck...

I did the same iTunes import test on my older tower, an MDD dual 867Mhz G4. I got 10-11 times encoding speed for the same audio disk for a time of 5 minutes and 50 seconds. That was using the Pioneer DVR-110D drive. I did not do the copy test this time.