iTunes and Windows Shares
I am having problems with iTunes. First here is my setup.
I've got 59 gigs of music. I used the option in iTunes to add a folder and gave it the root folder for all of my music. After letting iTunes run for 5 hours it had only cataloged 2.96 gigs of my music. At that rate it will take about 100 hours to let it add all of my music. Once the music is added anytime I select a song to play there is a 15 second delay before the song starts playing. This delay continues at the begining of every song as iTunes moves through the file list.
I don't think the problem is network latency. The computers are on a 100-Mbps network and there was no other network traffic when I did my test. There is only a single router between the server and the XP Pro machine. Windows Media Player was able to catalog all of the music within the same amount of time and I get enough network bandwidth to stream movies to my TV.
Any clue what is causing this?
My Setup:
I am running a computer with Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (new install). I keep all of my music on another machine that is running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition. This machine acts as a dedicated file server. It has a 120 gig drive for the OS and a 200 gig drive for my music. There is a file share that is mapped to a drive letter on the Windows XP Pro machine.
I've got 59 gigs of music. I used the option in iTunes to add a folder and gave it the root folder for all of my music. After letting iTunes run for 5 hours it had only cataloged 2.96 gigs of my music. At that rate it will take about 100 hours to let it add all of my music. Once the music is added anytime I select a song to play there is a 15 second delay before the song starts playing. This delay continues at the begining of every song as iTunes moves through the file list.
I don't think the problem is network latency. The computers are on a 100-Mbps network and there was no other network traffic when I did my test. There is only a single router between the server and the XP Pro machine. Windows Media Player was able to catalog all of the music within the same amount of time and I get enough network bandwidth to stream movies to my TV.
Any clue what is causing this?
My Setup:
I am running a computer with Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (new install). I keep all of my music on another machine that is running Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition. This machine acts as a dedicated file server. It has a 120 gig drive for the OS and a 200 gig drive for my music. There is a file share that is mapped to a drive letter on the Windows XP Pro machine.
Comments
Originally posted by a_greer
Make sure that it is not copying the files to the itunes default location, my docs/my music/itunes, click file->add folder to library, NOT import
It's not. I made sure of that before I even started the process. The computer from which I was adding music to the library is a laptop with only a 40 gig drive. It would have quickly been unindated with files had I not checked on that.
Last night I decided to try indexing the music again with Windows Media Player 9. I cleared out the music index that was on the computer and had it scan my music archive and add volume leveling information (meaning that it would have to scan each file entirely). I started the process at 2am. When I woke up at 7:20am the process was complete.
The only theory that I can come up with is that perhaps iTunes is also looking for the inaudiable watermarks that are added to iTunes tracks(?). Beyond that I am at a lost for theories.
Originally posted by alcedes
It's not. I made sure of that before I even started the process. The computer from which I was adding music to the library is a laptop with only a 40 gig drive. It would have quickly been unindated with files had I not checked on that.
Last night I decided to try indexing the music again with Windows Media Player 9. I cleared out the music index that was on the computer and had it scan my music archive and add volume leveling information (meaning that it would have to scan each file entirely). I started the process at 2am. When I woke up at 7:20am the process was complete.
The only theory that I can come up with is that perhaps iTunes is also looking for the inaudiable watermarks that are added to iTunes tracks(?). Beyond that I am at a lost for theories.
Check to see if you have Sound Check enabled in iTunes. Sound Check scans each song as it imports and can take a long time over a network or even locally with enough files.
Originally posted by Colby2000
Check to see if you have Sound Check enabled in iTunes.
It was disabled. Additionally I decided to use FileMon (http://www.systeminternals.com) to watch what iTunes is doing with files. I noticed that for each file I have it opens and closes the file atlease 4 times(?). I think that may be where the performance penalty is coming from.
Originally posted by alcedes
It was disabled. Additionally I decided to use FileMon (http://www.systeminternals.com) to watch what iTunes is doing with files. I noticed that for each file I have it opens and closes the file atlease 4 times(?). I think that may be where the performance penalty is coming from.
You mentioned that the host computer was running WMP9, are the songs encoded in WMA, the default for media player? If so then iTunes would try to convert them to aac or mp3, that would be your lag and explain the open/close 4 times thing.
If your collection is ripped to wma, as much as I hate it, get Music match jukebox free version, if I am not mistaken, it will convert wma->mp3 in batch and do it faster than itunes - just leave it run on the server for a day or so and vwala.
Originally posted by a_greer
You mentioned that the host computer was running WMP9, are the songs encoded in WMA, the default for media player?
I use MP3. I don't use Windows Media Player to organize or extract tracks to files. I only use Windows Media Player to play media. For ripping I use Easy CD-DA Extractor (http://www.poikosoft.com/)
Even if I did use WMP it would still rip in MP3. Any time I reinstall windows I always reinstall my MPEG codec and change the WMP settings so that I don't end up with DRM music.