Sluggish iTunes despite following steps
December 22, 2013 5:27 PM   Subscribe

I have my iTunes on an external 1 TB USB drive for iMac (10.6). It is around 250 GB. Despite following the steps of moving the itl and other files to my computer Itunes folder as layed out nicelly in this link among others (look at user roncron's commments at bottom of page). ITunes is still sluggish when deleting tracks especially. I have 3GB RAM, not using any other item while running iTunes, and Activity Monitor doesn't show any large discrepancies of things running in the background (unless I am looking at it wrong). Maybe my computer is just too old or needs 4 GB of RAM. thanks.
posted by snap_dragon to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: External drives are usually at the mercy of their connection to the computer. In terms of speed, FireWire 800 > USB 2.0 > Firewire 400 > USB 1.1, IIRC.

Also, your drive might be 5400 RPM or just maybe 4800 - modern drives are usually 7200 RPM. This can make a difference in loading times and such.

On the outside, this is the sort of thing that disk defragmenters were designed to deal with, i.e. remedy the low-speed of a well-used drive. Try that, but don't expect a miracle.

Can you transfer a few GB of songs to the computer and see if it behaves differently towards those?
posted by Sunburnt at 5:52 PM on December 22, 2013


Response by poster: Immediate response when on computer. Not sure how to tell the RPM on the drive. It got it last year but not sure how to tell. Perhaps is the connection.
posted by snap_dragon at 6:04 PM on December 22, 2013


Best answer: You could install Media Monkey as a way of testing if it's just iTunes being weird. I ended up changing to Media Monkey due to the lag issues in iTunes.
posted by fredmounts at 12:06 PM on December 23, 2013


Best answer: I gave it some more thought and realized that it was working well before, presumably, so probably iTunes is slowing things down by maintaining some kind of overbuilt catalog of the external drive's contents, and that's what's gumming things up. If there's a way to get it to move all of its index-like information onto the main computer, that could help.

Alternate player, as suggested above, is very likely to work.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:43 PM on December 23, 2013


Response by poster: These are all good answers...thank you very much...

Jer
posted by snap_dragon at 3:46 PM on December 24, 2013


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