Comments on: More Ways iTunes Sucks for Large Digital Music Collections

By: wesfest311

wesfest311 — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:28:50 +0000

this is a great article, i know i am a year behind the last post but it helped. I have itunes 9 and an external hard drive with 65,000 tunes, and had never had a problem until i threw away my old dell desktop, now i have my itunes running well and smooth on my macbook… at least i finally got it working and can upgrade my iphone i have been putting this off for some time now.

thanks for helping me turn off that damn gapless playback… it was easy just had to wait five min…

By: moodfood

moodfood — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:37:00 +0000

THERE ARE SOME EXCELLENT COMMENTS HERE! AND GOOD ORIG POST TOO. THANKS!!!

my library is 150GB it’s 15,000 tunes and lots of video content for the AppleTV. My music folder contains over 2500 sub folders, and is located on an external drive, it takes forever to open that puppy! I dread having to do maint work in that music folder! Even re-naming a folder causes it to refresh the whole list – which can take over 3 minutes! (I play a lot of solitaire while waiting!)

I wish I could COLOR CODE a song in the database list view similar to the color coding in the Finder (mac) Then I could sort by the color code in addition to artist, title, etc.

I just found out about separate libraries from this article – good reading, but not quite advanced enough for my needs, it has some good advice: http://www.macworld.com/secrets/2006/06/julyplaylist/index.php

iTunes definitely needs some new features that help manage large libraies!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:39:00 +0000

Mediamonkey is Windows only.

My large but not overwhelming collection (200G) has frequently had its config wiped out while iTunes evemtually hung and a force quit corrupted the database. Get some programmers who understand transactions, Apple.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:59:00 +0000

Hmm,I’ve been using mediamonkey gold for the past year and IMHO it handles my large digital audio library with the ease that I find itunes 7 severely lacks due to using SQLlite for its database structure. Also, the options available for its smartplaylist analogue (auto playlist) is more comprehensive, with the addition of five custom fields in the place of just one group field found in itunes. I found that an extremely useful feature in creating autoplaylists for reading, mood, etc. Finally, synching my ipod to my created autoplaylists is a snap.

Here’s a screenshot of my config. from available scripts and skins:

http://img241.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=19651_monkey_122_447lo.jpg

By: Quikboy

Quikboy — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:09:00 +0000

I use WMP 11. I find that it handles large libraries pretty well. And it doesn’t come with the bloat like iTunes does.

And I also find the navigation pretty more straightforwards, and I just love the add-ons!

By: myra

myra — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:37:00 +0000

I have nearly the same problems as you. I was using itunes 6 until I got an iPhone a few weeks ago and was forced to finally upgrade. My library is nearly 1TB (120,000+ files) and the gapless playback is by far the most annoying feature I’ve ever encountered. After putting it off, I finally decided to spend today loading each partition (about 50-100 gbs in each) and letting itunes do its business step by step, but still after deleting the “corrupt” files that freeze it, it just keeps doing it over and over and over and over again. It slows my Macbook Pro to a near halt while doing this so I can’t even use my computer while it’s “determining” things.

I hate itunes 7 with a passion. All we’re asking is for a simple little button to disable this unnecessary feature. It’s been out for over a year and this complaint has been around since day one.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 09:53:00 +0000

according to this website, it looks like you have to wait a few minutes before the gapless check actually stops (have you tried that?)

http://i.nconspicuo.us/2006/11/16/itunes-determining-gapless-playback-information/3/

“While iTunes is Determining Gapless Playback Information, make sure to stop it by pressing this X before you try the steps on page 1 of this post. Note: Only press the X once and give it time to stop… give it a couple minutes if necessary. I had over 3,500 songs on a network storage device and I believe it took my computer about 2-3 minutes before iTunes actually became functional again. So be patient, wait it out, and then try the steps noted on the previous page.”

as for me – I’m actually a huge fan of gapless playback – I actually stumbled upon your blog as I’m trying to figure something out – I like to make mixes of various songs (using Acoustica Audio Mixer) and blend the songs into each other (like a dj or radio station might overlap songs) – back-to-back-to-back, these songs play back gapless-ly on iTunes, and its supposed to play back gapless-ly on iPod as well… but it isn’t for some reason – not sure if its because the Acoustica creates a wav file, not an mp3 file, so maybe iTunes can’t determine gapless information on wav files – if anyone has any ideas on this, I would love to hear them

By: anthony

anthony — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:11:00 +0000

show me a player that has the same functionality as iTunes’ SmartPlaylists and I will switch. Until then, there’s nothing better.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 07:51:00 +0000

Whiner

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:04:00 +0000

I'm kind of blown away by the sheer size of the music collections being talked about here. Mine's about 80Gb and it comes out to about 45 days of continuous audio. 350gb, I'm guessing, would be about around six months worth.

It's also impressive that most of the software solutions that catalog and play back all of that music are available for free. If you look at it that way, the fact than none of them handle 350gb gracefully doesn't seem as big a deal.

On the other hand though, they have the technology...