iTunes Question: Need Technical Advice
Okay, I am currently contemplaiting what I should do about this situation.
As it stands, this is my current song number in iTunes:
Every song is in an album, and every album is a playlist. I have nearly three thousand albums (if you saw my music collection you would not question the legitimacy of how I got them).
Now, here is my problem.....
I am running iTunes on a G4 450 MHz with 512MBs of memory with two 256MB chips. iTunes is bog slow. It is a dedicated box just for my music, with all of the music being stored on an external 400GB FireWire hard drive.
Would maxing the memory help, or would getting an entirely new, faster machine be the way to go?
Any assistance on this would be much appreciated! Thank you.
As it stands, this is my current song number in iTunes:
Every song is in an album, and every album is a playlist. I have nearly three thousand albums (if you saw my music collection you would not question the legitimacy of how I got them).
Now, here is my problem.....
I am running iTunes on a G4 450 MHz with 512MBs of memory with two 256MB chips. iTunes is bog slow. It is a dedicated box just for my music, with all of the music being stored on an external 400GB FireWire hard drive.
Would maxing the memory help, or would getting an entirely new, faster machine be the way to go?
Any assistance on this would be much appreciated! Thank you.
Comments
Why?
My guess is RAM would help most, since my feeble old 350MHz G3 does just fine hosting 10GB of music.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Each album is an individual playlist?
Why?
My guess is RAM would help most, since my feeble old 350MHz G3 does just fine hosting 10GB of music.
Because that's the way I prefer it. Not to sound cocky.
10GB is not that much, and iTunes can handle that just fine but when you have 152.97GBs it chokes.
Originally posted by Jared
Because that's the way I prefer it. Not to sound cocky.
10GB is not that much, and iTunes can handle that just fine but when you have 152.97GBs it chokes.
just wondering, have you tried using the browse tab to sort albums and artists? sorry, i had to ask.
i bet the problem is a combo of processor and ram needing updates.
Originally posted by Jared
Because that's the way I prefer it. Not to sound cocky.
10GB is not that much, and iTunes can handle that just fine but when you have 152.97GBs it chokes.
Right, that was my point about RAM.
Each playlist is a chunk of memory that needs to be kept in RAM, active. Browsing by album only needs a chunk as you're browsing, and then only for the album you're looking at.
By placing each album in its own playlist, you're unnecessarily using a rather large amount of RAM. It's your choice, of course, but it's a needless (in my opinion) waste of your time setting it up, and of RAM for iTunes. That alone may be a good part of the problem.
Originally posted by Jared
Because that's the way I prefer it. Not to sound cocky.
10GB is not that much, and iTunes can handle that just fine but when you have 152.97GBs it chokes.
More RAM might help. I suspect part of the problem might be the size of the "itunes music library.xml" file. If the file is larger than 4GB, OSX and the G4 processor have to jump through lots of hoops to address that much data. Those hoops involve 'paging' portions of the file to/from disk, and that is really slow. If you really want to serve that much music from one machine, you might want to think about a G5 machine that uses 64bit addressing rather than 32bit addressing that the G4 uses.
BTW, that is one impressive music library.
Time for an iMac G5!