Why Is iTunes So Incredibly Slow?

Come on Apple – write a program that can scroll a text list without hanging my machine. I have a modest sized music library and a fast new PC – why does moving the scroll bar freeze my whole system for 30 seconds? Why does iTunes take 2 minutes to boot? Why does it constantly nag me to install new versions, and make me reinstall quicktime each time?

Maybe by making the PC/iTunes experience so miserable, Apple is hoping to make people switch out of sheer frustration. iTunes is just a list of files and a play button – not sure why it needs to commandeer my whole system. Winamp had this stuff figured out years ago and did it in about 200k. Now if only I hadn’t bought that ipod….

278 Responses

  1. Recoil says:

    I ended up switching to WMP11 months ago in frustration. The damn thing just gets worse and worse. The ultimate irony is that WMP11 is probably the best mainstream media player I’ve ever used. Yes, A Microsoft product far better than the Apple equivalent. The GUI is polished and minimalistic, the library functionality is both elegant and snappy, it supports playlists a la Winamp without the risk of knocking them out by hitting a random MP3 in explorer. It is bizarrely excellent.

    As for the iPod problem: Easily solved with Ipod Linux, or Floola / Yamipod.


    I wouldn’t even think of turning back.

    • Tornato7 says:

      Dude, WinAmp is not a microsoft product…

    • John says:

      I-Tunes sucks, that is why. I had an expensive Apple laptop that I-Tunes froze up and would not extract the disc. Not even re-booting would get the disc out. That laptop had a slot drive. The only way I could remove the disc was to take the laptop apart and physically remove it from the dive. No more I-Tunes for this guy. Never in a million years.

      • Jonathan Alfonso says:

        I do hope you know this has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with iTunes, but the fact that the disc was jammed in the drive. Any program would not be able to read a jammed disk, and the OS can’t just magically fix it. Taking it apart was obviously necessary, and this would be normal in most any other laptop.

  2. i think you have a cheap Dell Machine
    buy a Mac… it is still the better PC also with Vista 64bit !!! (MacPro)
    i never understand People like you using a PC ??? Why ??? because it is cheaper ? lol
    I Think you earn enough Money to buy a better PC.

    • M says:

      Let me get this straight. Your suggestion to make a simple music organizer for a couple hundred dollar iPod work well is to spend thousands of dollars on an entirely new computer?


      • Joe says:

        I hate iTunes its so fucking slow. It takes like 10 seconds to start up! I can open up google chrome and google up: iTunes is so fucking slow faster than its start up (literally because i just did it! and found this article..) and look at my notebook what the fuck..
        My PC Specs:
        Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
        Intel Core i5-430m
        4 GB DDR3 Ram
        Nvidia 310m 512mb DDR3

        My advice is to use Foobar2000 its a great open-source media player! It is FULLY user GUI customizable and has a lot of great features like FLAC playback and good converting capability. MUCH MUCH MUCH better than shitTunes.

      • Steve says:


    • shark says:

      What a jerk you are – Germans……ugh.

    • john says:

      did you ever think that maybe some people can only use pc’s? i use programs for work that are pc based. why would i buy a mac?

      i hate how mac forces you to buy everything apple.

      • kNanda says:

        Yeah, I hate apple too. It’s a stingy, terribly mean company. Don’t you think so? It forces us to buy everything apple. Even a cable for the projector port. LoL. Wow, PC are so generous. Hundreds of thousands of software. Hacked! Cracked! Or Genuine! Any kind you want. That’s why most people on this Earth use PC. And they will do so in the future. Give me a free MAC, I am going to put it in the DUMP. FUCK.

        • Duckbutter22 says:

          Don’t you think PC’s are just as stingy? mac doesnt get to play half the games that PC gamers do. I am not sticking up for either but they are both PRETTY stingy if you wanna say that. I own both but I will say it is SUPER messed up that apple can’t get a decent version of Itunes for a PC

          • TTurner says:

            Windows isn’t being stingy on the games, Macs just don’t handle most games well, mostly because of the lack of a right click function standard until recently, and the usual Mac mouse is still crap for a right click. also, Macs have a different code base from Windows that just doesn’t like to support a lot of games developed for computers. If you’re doing graphics, get a Mac, if you game, Get a Windows, and if you want both, get a bad-ass computer with over the top capability that runs windows, like I did. <3 my Asus n90s (still cheaper than a comparable mac, IF you can find a comparable mac). Sadly, as awesome as it is, iTunes seems to be designed to not run effectively for a Windows OS, so Apple is saying screw you iPod owners that have Windows OS.

    • JrmN -Invasion says:

      Listen rofl, the only reason why a mac might run better with iTunes, is because there made by the same company so it’s compatible. Apple sucks royal ass. From the beginning of time for apple it was shit! regardless of if they were first or not. Pc’s run cleaner and your not stuck with one fucken brand all the time, so on a plus side it allows more competition in the market, and can open more job opportunities for these other companies when making hardware. Seriously No apple computer ive touched has matched any pc.. and im running on a quad core hp with 1 terabyte of ram, and a 1tb hard drive with a 2 tb external and dual video cards with 4 3.0 processing. and apple still fucken struggles from time to time to load! explain to me how thats fucken possible.

      • Justin says:

        holy shitballs!! one terabyte of ram?!!!!? your ram can run like 4 times what my hard drive can even store

      • Accusation says:

        There is not conceivable way you have a 1 Tera-byte RAM PC…

      • josh says:

        im running a 3.4 ghz quad core cpu 8gb ram 1gb asus hd radeon 6670 graphics card, and itunes doesnt lag on boot but lags when i try and scroll it takes like 30 sec to start playing the song i select. p.s a 32bit os can only use 4gb ram and a 64bit os can run 196gb and nothing more of ram so the guy is incorrect ;/

      • David says:

        Yes your so right. I to have a nice computer not as much ram but way More then most. And yet I have become a victim of apple. I updated the latest Itunes and now it takes
        forever to start and then freezes. If it weren’t not for the fact of owning am Ipad 2. Ipod, and the wife having a apple cell phone. I could tell you in a lot of bad language exactly what I would do with Itunes. I can say that I will not longer be upgrading or buying any other Apple products unless they can devote some time into getting Itunes to functioning property. Without a functioning Itunes why buy there products.

    • conrad says:

      my 6 core rig cuts through everything except itunes. Perhaps this is the latest Jobs joke to get every one to by the Ipc.

    • I really dont like osx. I own a mac, and I run linux on it. the hardware is pretty good I will give them that, with some exceptions(the ability of the macbook air to be used to boil water, ipod batteries, etc)
      but telling someone to buy a different computer to solve the itunes issue is basically saying apple doesnt really port stuff to other platforms, they make it shitty on purpose in a lame effort to get you to buy a mac. if thats the case I have two things to say.
      1. open source projects are already solved most of peoples problems with ipod usage(gtkpod and others)

      • kkr203 says:

        yes Linux! I ran Linux: Ubuntu and Rhythmbox was for sure the best player I’ve used for my purposes. It’s simple, loads in a whiz, and doesn’t stop or do stupid stuff when it comes to a file that it won’t play. Also, the operating system itself for Linux: Ubuntu ran much smoother with my hardware than Windows 7, which came with the machine.

        The iTunes I use at work (Windows XP) is DEATHLY slow in similar ways to the posts found here, Windows Media Player (WMP) is ok but it can be annoying to navigate (like Word can be sometimes) for no reason. Also WMP will stop playing music if it comes to a file that it doesn’t recognize rather than skip it sometimes. Boo! Sadly, I had to switch back from Linux: Ubuntu to Windows 7 in order to play my favorite PC games (RCT, Age of Empires, etc). But if Wine kicks enough ass in the future then it’s back to Linux for sure! (Yes, I chose not to partition my hard drive throughout all of these experiences)

        • Sudsiv says:

          When banshee/rhythmbox/gtkpod works….. it works amazingly. But it has problems with newer ipods like my ipod touch 4g. But still amazing.

          • danny783 says:

            So people who run linux, can you run Itunes on linux? if not can you use an ipod with other media player software? I really like that you can rate your music easily and the smart playlists make it really easy to find my music. Especially becuase i have a huge library….

    • Matt says:

      I’m really really really really tired of Apple users thinking that everything Apple is so superior to Windows Products. I love my iphone but frankly dropping a ton of money on a Mac Book simply so that itunes can work better is not what I am about to do. I have a Windows 7 64 bit machine with 12 GB of tri channel Ram and is a KICK ASS machine. I would never be able to get a machine like this purchasing an Apple product. Sure the iphone is great, I love it and will probably never purchase a different mobile device but don’t give me that crap that Apple products are the end all of be all of technology. Itunes runs like a Turtle on my machine and its not Microsofts fault. nuf said.

    • Andreas says:

      Given the experience with itunes, I am not inclined to trust the manufacturer of that itunes piece of software to be so much better for a full computer…

    • Alex says:

      I use all Operating systems depending on the task at hand, I have a PC, Mac, and I dual boot Linux as well, Every OS has its pro’s and con’s but you DO NOT need a mac to transfer music, I own a mac and I love it, same for my PC

      Think logically… not everyone in the world can afford a $1500 machine.

      • john says:

        Its not necessarily $1500. My macbook refurbished was around $900. Around the same price I spent on my desktop computer when building it. My macbook is 3 years old and it runs great.

        My desktop runs windows 7, its what I use for gaming. I love windows 7 as well

        The fight b/t microsoft and apple is stupid. Both have good and bad sides. Personally when it comes to games, my desktop easily out performs my macbook. But for most other things, my macbook will do just as well or better. The macbook is a lot easier to use. It also allows for less customization, which I hate. I love windows cause I can make it look the way I want, but it also doesn’t run as clean.

        Anyways, thats just simply my two cents. You can always find good deals, just need to look around.

    • Just Me says:

      People like you cannot fathom the idea that someone would actually prefer Windows over Apple. And just because the Apple commercials and CEO members say it’s the best doesn’t make it so. I can bet that you have no scientific evidence that Apple is better than Windows in at least one aspect. So why do you get Apple without doing empirical research? Because it makes you “feel” cool? lol. or because the commercials in TV said it’s revolutionary? lol.

    • tyler james says:

      Macs are overpriced computers sold with marketing gimmicks to lock you in. I dont use a mac because they make it almost impossible to try to customize, windows I can go into the directory and change anything I want, I can patch programs much easier, Ive never had an issue with a crashing PC I use AVG free for viruses and I always buy loaded up Dell’s.

      They are cheaper to buy even after massively upgrading them, also software aside Mac and Dells, IBM, compaq they are all basically the same with different cases. Dollar for dollar comparing just hardware, the PC will blow the Mac out of the water in everything from computing power, ram size and speed,gaming and usually HD size.

      Thats why I use a PC…

  3. Jeff says:

    I agree. I tunes is ridiculous. If Apple can be ok with releasing such a crap application I want nothing to do with them. So “it’s for a Win PC”, still..the software has the apple name in it.

    Screw the coffee-shop-with-my-trusty-apple fanboys!


  4. Tangent says:

    iTune is slow, even iTune on Mac itself is slow. So I definitely share your frustration. This is why I use “Foola” which is a much better iTune alternative. It is open-sourced, and free. It does not wipe your iPod if it already has music from another computer.

  5. fred says:

    Stefan has a typical mindless answer about Apple computers. Apple computers aren’t perfect too you know, a friend of mine changed his motherboard on his Mac book Pro 3 times in the same year, wheres the quality in that ?

    Stop saying Apple is so perfect because it’s NOT. I had PC’s at home since ever and working with MAC’s at work for ever so I both know them very good. Neither is better! They both rock and suck at some point.

    itunes is like Vista… They both need alot of ram to work. Why? I don’t know. Winamp is still the best one to me but it will never work with my apple tv…

    • dixlexxik says:

      exactly apple computer are far from the best machine on earth they do what they have to do and its kinda weird they actually perform at certain task better, they are build out of Foxconn hardware witch is really cheap! so basically your paying more for low end hardware … I think i’m better of with my pc with as windows 7 and a dual boot with Hackitosh for other thing I would need of a mac, for a sweet little price 😉 ( and almost all hackitosh out perform the mac, depending on the hardware of curse )

  6. John says:

    I’ve been on a mac for 4 yrs+. I still miss Win Amp. But that’s about the only thing I miss about a PC.

  7. Troy Blank says:

    Don’t forget about QuickTime, the only thing that has ever crashed my vista system to the point of forcing restart is running After Effects and getting a QuickTime runtime error. I woudn’t but it past apple to be assholes and make this stuff horrible on purpose (just look at their relationship with adobe, like a battered housewife and a drunk husband), but i think it might be that apple products are used to living in a world stripped of 3rd party hardware complexities, therefore they don’t know how to program something that will “just work”, as ironic as that seems.

  8. Recoil says:


    Agreed, this is typical mindless Apple drone fanboyism drivel at its worst. Apples are great, Stefan, but they’re not the king shit you’ve fooled yourself into thinking they are. The problem isn’t Windows, it’s iTunes. Don’t kid yourself otherwise.

    iTunes isn’t bad because it’s on a PC. iTunes is bad because it’s bad. The shoddy PC port is problem enough, and Apple’s fault, NOT Microsoft’s, but iTunes is crap enough itself as a program on *any* platform.

  9. Felix Turner says:

    thanks for the recommendations on WMP11 + Floola – I’ll check those out. Anyone used winamp recently? It’s a shame iTunes is useless because the UI is nice and it does everything I need.

  10. Josh says:

    Everyone seems to say that iTunes is slow on Windows. I’ve never had a problem with performance though. It has always been quick and responsive–even on my three year old PC that got retired recently. Maybe everyone has music libraries that are significantly larger than mine or maybe it’s something else. Regardless, I wish I could help you make iTunes work better on your machine, but I thought I’d share that the slow iTunes problem is not universal.

  11. Felix Turner says:

    @Josh – I think responsiveness is directly related to library size. My lib is ~70Gb. How big is yours?

  12. Stephen says:

    It is responsive to library size but also under the “Advanced” tab you need to tick “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library”…. If you don’t then iTunes constantly trys to cross reference / relocate the original music file when you scroll down (70Gig of music files all in different locations is a lot of work for iTunes to keep track of).

    I’m running 40Gigs of music and it’s lightning fast !!

    • Erin says:

      FFFFFFFF ITunes. Here just because I wondered this very same question, many many times.

      I saw a comment about tickin the keep library organized and copy files to Itunes folder thing, which supposedly helps itunes run faster, thats a bunch of shit if you ask me, whatt he fuck other program won’t let you CHOOSE what folder you want it to read its libraries from? What, either you are forced to keep all your music in its own stupid folder, or keep duplicates? I can’t be keeping dupes of ~80Gigs of music, and ideally I would love my music to remain on its own drive some day. Itunes, learn to play nicely, thanks.

  13. Patric says:

    @Stefan: when i first read your post I was thinking exactly the same the like the others already posted… I know a lot very bad mac users and I hat to see someone how is proud to have a mac just to feel better than the rest of the world but in fact the person is to stupit to use it.

    @Felix: In my office I have a library of 30GB on a very fast PC(4GB RAM and a new CPU) and at home just a smale of 8GB on a slow 6 year old laptop and the one in my office is slower than the one at home…this is just embarrasing-.-

  14. Ben Moffett says:

    Hey Look here guys…stop arguing pc vs. mac. That’s not the problem. It is all relevent to your system. Most people have the mindset their sytem is fast enough until they start working with media files. ALL TYPES OF MEDIA FILES, whether video or audio require a good bit more ram than just a 500k chip…upgrade your ram to atleast 2gb of ram and you will see vast improvements everywhere not just itunes. I have been running macs since 92 and every mac I get I max the ram capapbility out right from the start and never look back. My systems always run lighting fast because I don’t fool myself into thinking they are fast out of the box.

    • bart wakker says:

      I have a mac with 4GB RAM and a quad core windows 7 desktop with 8GB of RAM.

      On both, itunes is slow as hell. I hate it deeply, and for me it is almost a reason to junk my iphone and ipad. It is terrible that such a pig is required to use your iphone.

      I have only 120GB of audio files, on my NAS (network access). All other media libraries I have used (mostly jriver media center) work very fast with this amount of data on my network drive. I don’t understand why after so many versions itunes still is so slow and constantly is unresponsive.

    • Pete says:

      itunes is total crap, i have a computer that i built myself with all top of the line parts… i can run 20 other programs at the same time as running itunes and they all run perfect and fast but if i dare click on itunes and it is doing any kind of processing it is very obvious that it is running slower than everything else due to its crappy programming. Apple is all crap, they try and rip you off any chance they can. Why do you need to spend hundreds more to get a few more gigs on an iphone, ipod.. etc. i can go buy a 16 gig chip for my android for 20 bucks. They don’t respect the consumer, i don’t respect them. Just another super power throwing their weight around. Thing are going to start going downhill for them and their cocky attitude. 🙂

  15. Felix Turner says:

    @Stephen: I have both those options checked. All my music is in 1 folder.
    @Ben: I have 2 Gb RAM and know how to keep my machine running well.

    Neither of these things help.

  16. Troy Blank says:

    Itunes Helper runs in windows all the time by default and most times when you upgrade the software, to see some improvements in with your cpu make sure to kill that on startup, just thought i would add that one 😀

    and regards to Ben Moffett, I use itunes to share libraries with other people at my work, and regardless of RAM my creative player and windows media player (which has it’s moments) are so much less a hog of my CPU, so i would give itunes a D- as far as good media players goes, also the xml list it keeps of your track data are only good if you stay with itunes, most other programs use meta-data to keep their libraries organized allowing you to move from program to program without frustration. Though i will admit there is some cool applications out there that use itunes xml to do some pretty cool stuff, so it’s kind of a win lose.

  17. Strohsilo says:

    I got the same problem as in the post described. but only since i’ve updated from 7.5 to 7.6. my system is running on a 3.2ghz pc with 2gb Ram, and the library is 97gig on a network drive. and my music was in the itunes folder.

    before the update, its running fast and smooth. now it stops around 30 seconds, but them music is playing still. now its terrible to work with!

    don’t think this is a problem of hardware or mac/pc. apple should make this (good?) tool better, faster and lighter!

  18. Felix Turner says:

    To add insult to injury… In a effort to speed up iTunes I updated from 7.2 to v7.6. This caused iTunes to forget where my music library was. After choosing my lib folder, the library updated (took about an hour). Now about 25% of my songs can’t be found – even though the files are there! sort it out apple…

  19. Patric says:

    @Felix: I know the problem my friend had lost 40% of his library after an update of itune. but the songs were deleted.

    My itues forgot also where my library was after an update… but it was easy to fix.

  20. Hampus says:

    I totally agree, I don’t use winamp cause it’s to slow. I recomend Foobar, fast as lightning 😉 It’s sad that i have to open itunes everytime I want more music for my Ipod.

  21. Bill says:

    Perhaps Apple is just giving Microsoft a taste of their own medicine. MS applications on Mac are usually slow and error prone. Or maybe it’s the underlying OS built atop another OS thats the problem. iTunes runs great on all the Macs here.

  22. Petee says:

    I also got fed up with iTunes. Fortunatelly I do not have an iPod, I have bought a PDA with GPS, WiFi instead. It also good for listening music.
    I recommend to use foobar. It is really lightweight, fast and you can customize as you wish. So it has a much better GUI also. I think in tearm of music quality is also the better..
    So you can be happy without winamp, wm, and apple also..

  23. Luck3r says:

    iTunes sucks, Macs suck, Windows sucks. With Linux even the old P2 133MHz can be a quite good media center. Just try Amarok, it’s much better than iTunes.
    I was a Windows user once, and many of my friends got Macs so I know those systems quite well. Linux easily beats them both. And don’t say “Linux is for console freaks!”, that’s just not true anymore. About performance: Even the eeePC can run all those cool desktop effects (Compiz Fusion) very smooth, almost no CPU usage at all.
    Read this (especially the motivation part): http://en.opensuse.org/How_to_migrate_from_Windows

  24. Felix Turner says:

    I’m running foobar2000 now. It’s super minimal and fast 🙂 I guess I’ll only run itunes when I need to rip a CD or update my ipod.

  25. loze says:

    I unchecked “look for shared libraries” and now its MUCH MUCH faster, almost bearable
    itunes 7.6.1

  26. Joki says:

    You can manage your iPod with Winamp 5… Winamp is also much faster to transfer files on the iPod, it doesn’t freeze every time you want to make a change on the iPod.

  27. Jose says:

    If on Vista, have you tried using iTunes “Run as Admin…’?
    IF on XP or vista , have you considered uninstalling Quicktime+itunes, restarting, using a reg cleaner (like CCleaner), restart, and a reinstall of quicktime+itunes?

    We could fight all day about whioch system+media software is better, but it accomplishes nothing. Why don’t you go out and support your developer/opensource group of choice, and help get the next killer app out for all of us? 😉

  28. Dig says:

    I have a tricked out year old MacPro OS 10.4 and a year old $1100 HP Windows Vista Business machine. My iTunes library is 34GB of music and 50GB of video. iTunes could definitely be snappier on both systems but its not slow nor does it freeze my system.
    I feel like every upgrade that they add features bloats it more and more but I still like it more than the alternatives. I have my libraries shared, let iTunes organize my music, and have a small external drive just for music and videos.

  29. Sam says:

    To Stefan Hollenkamp:
    Look at the stats. Not the stats apple’s writers make up for their commercials. The stats that have been found from many weeks of testing in hundreds of different PC to software combinations. Windows is faster, supports more games, software, freeware, hardware, and utilities, and it has better graphics, video, and internet options. Plus there are tons of different OS’s you can put on a PC so you can find the perfect one for you and not be CONTROLLED by Apple. Would you rather be controlled by your Mac or would you rather control your PC?

    As for this post, yes i really wish they would stop with the “apple is better so we should only serve our loyal drones” attitude.

    I’ve had this question burning in my head for some time now.
    Why is it PC vs Mac?
    Mac is a PC. Duh. PC stands for Personal Comupter. Mac is a computer right? And is it personal? I do believe so. Does this not make it a Personal Computer (PC) ???
    We’re all just running PC’s in a world of competitive companies brainwashing the arrogant folks into thinking there is a best computer.

    Haha, wow. I really got off topic! Oh well. See ya!

  30. pu says:

    to sam:

    pc is reported to conformity… you can buy dell, hp, ecc… but there is always windows the windows “option”…. and this sucks… microsoft killed lot of os producers… apple survived to this… in the past years i couldn’t surf the web because internet explorer put some standards that worked ONLY on windows… and we were obligated to use ie for the web and on mac was incredibly slow… it is that right? is right only for microsoft cash for me… now apple’s got the revenge… and i’m very pleased for this… i’m sorry but you can’t immagine how frustrated was to can’t play on mac different games such has halo… bungie developed only games for mac a time… microsoft bought bungie some months before the mac release and halo went out three years later for mac!! and running incredibly slow!

    ah dear sam… we have unix on our os… you can install all that you want… think before write

    instead (not sure for this) itunes run slowly maybe is it based on mac osx core, such core animation, core image ecc,,, it is based on some code process that windows must first translate and run… same thing when i play some games that were optimized for directx …

    p.s. sorry for my bad english (i’m Italian!!)

  31. Cristi says:

    Sam, PC vs MAC means WINDOWS vs MAC. MAC means hardware+OSX.
    OSX is better of course, and so is iTunes on OSX, its in his medium. Some people who never tried both should not talk.

  32. Troy says:

    One simple solution for all the complainers out there……. BUY A MAC! your problems will be gone!! 🙂

  33. Andrew says:

    As someone who owns both PCs and Macs, I have to say that yes, iTunes absolutely SUCKS on Windows. On Macs, however, it is a dream to use. I really don’t know why Apple doesn’t make it faster for PC users. iTunes is really the only Apple application most PC users ever use, so why not make it as enjoyable as possible?

  34. Elmyr says:

    The sluggishness of my iTunes seems directly tied to my usage of uTorrent. When the latter is running, iTunes is utterly unresponsive. No problems when nothing else is hogging up the bandwidth…

  35. Paul Shannon says:

    Dude you should really try SharePod. It is freeware and is a great alternative to iTunes.

    You can even run SharePod directly from your iPod. Great for connecting to internet cafe machines etc without having to install anything.

    I use it all the time, because I hate iTunes so much.


    • Steve says:

      SharePod is the only way to fly with an iPod. You’ll need a throwaway laptop that you can install iTunes on to initialize your iPod. I don’t even want that software to touch my full-time PC. SharePod lets you move everything and anything to or from your iPod or anyone else’s iPod. It basically turns it into the mp3 player WHOLLY OWNED BY YOU that it should be. I used iTunes for a matter of minutes before it drove me crazy and into the arms of SharePod. Slow, intrusive, ponderous, and meddling with things in Windows that leave me baffled. What are you doing installing a gargantuan set of programs on my machine? All I want is to download music and run it on the mp3 player that I personally own. The whole Apple brand is a crock of sheit.

  36. Dan says:

    Two things. First, Sam, you accuse mac users of believing Apple’s stats, and whose are you buying into? Surely, since you know the absolute truth, you must be running the benchmarks and all tests on your own. Wait, you’re not? then you must be believing someone else’s reports. Popular Mechanics just released an article about Macs “trouncing” PCs in all their tests.

    Second, which is actually the root of all these posts, iTunes is apparently slow on Windows PCs. I’ve never heard a Mac user complain about iTunes being slow on their machine, so that leads me to believe that it may just be a PC issue. Either Apple wrote a program that isn’t that great on PCs (which, based on their branding and desire to not alienate anyone seems unlikely) or the real problem lies with PCs running Windows (which seems very likely). Microsoft has a stellar reputation, I mean, look at how happy everyone is with Vista! And it came out right on time! The problem most likely lies in their court.

  37. joey says:

    I gave up on ipod mainly because of itunes. itunes is so old and clunky and has been patched together so many times that it is now the epitome of crappy software that Mac users like to complain about.

    Confession time: I bought a second gen Zune and I actually like it. Between this device and Windows Media Center, I have some renewed faith in what MS can accomplish. Here is a shallow-dive into my Zune experience: http://www.bowlesonline.com/i-bought-a-zune

  38. Dark Vyper says:

    Zune doesn’t have a hope in hell…

    How big are most peoples libraries? Mine is 9GB and I dont have any problem with responsiveness. Is that perhaps near the limit for Windows users?

  39. Sniper says:

    I have a high end PC with a 0+1 RAID array. iTunes started to run sluggish when I went over 30000 songs (~190 GB). Adding songs to the library is now a pain. I do think that Apple need to do something about this or many users, like me, will start to explore alternatives. Apple do want users in iTunes since it’s tied into the iTunes store where they can make money. Foobar, Songbird…or something

  40. HPR says:

    I started experiencing real slowness in iTunes (on Mac) and that’s why I came to this site… iTunes was taking 100% of the CPU and even mundane tasks like selecting a song for playing or changing song name was taking too much time. After sometime, I realized that last.fm plugin was taking 100% of time as well… I quite last.fm and then iTunes started behaving OK.

    Even when iTunes was slow, it was limited to my music library — the iTunes Store works like a breeze most of the time.

    Bottomline: make sure that you fancy things like iLike Sidebar or last.fm scrobbler are not ruining you.

    I have more than 15000 songs in my library.

  41. NTR says:

    I don’t really care how much anyone likes his Mac, or his PC, or any available media player… I bought a “Windows Compatible iPod” and the sincyng software sucks, I want it better, fixed, how much is that to ask for?
    On the other hand many Apple fans make themselves look retarded on this threads, when someone is complaining about some real flaw or weakness of Apple software they come out with the most stupid justifications, like “iTunes is slow so you have more time to think about life” or “It’s your Windows computer” my computer can handle a whole 16 channel 24 bits Data Aquisition System for as long as you want without freezing even once, it’s the stupid software… TRUST ME

  42. […] großen Bibliotheken wirklich langsam, und diese Erfahrung habe ich nicht allein gemacht (siehe: Why is iTunes so incredibly slow? oder iTunes and Large Libraries: Slow, Slow, Slow). Da ich meine Musik CD’s derzeit gerade […]

  43. Matt says:

    I was a great iTunes user until I upgraded to the latest a few days ago (I can’t even get the help to come up now to find the version number). It is so slow it’s unusable: I suspect it has to do with some sort of machinations pertaining to Album art support for the iPhone/iPod touch.

    My 80G library is hosted on a Linux server, and I access it from xmms no problem. Nothing has changed with the server: it’s this new version of iTunes.

    And I don’t want to hear “copy files to iTunes folder” … I don’t need TWO copies of a 80 G library floating around. My laptop disk isn’t that large (it dual boots Linux and Windows), and besides I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT. I write software for a living: this isn’t that hard.

    Apple: great ideas conceived by the best visionaries, designed by the best minds, implemented by graduate students.

  44. Why in the world would Apple have any incentive to improve a free piece of software?

  45. Wes Cain says:

    Good lord Eliot- I hope your question is a joke. If Honda makes a Civic that the axles break if four people get in and has a max speed of 20 mph, are you fool enough to buy an Accord? Would Walgreens build a store on top of a mountain that you have to hike to, or are they smart enough to know that it’ll irritate people to the point that no one wants to shop there? If you see a commercial on TV that takes ten minutes, runs at one-quarter speed, and is in Dutch, are you going to be interested in the product?

    Perhaps you should take a business class.

  46. Sam says:

    Well guys, I have been reading some of your responses. I have 1GB of RAM and a 200GB library on my PC, boy does iTunes run well (no sarcasm there).

  47. HipstersAreSheep says:

    Wow. Some of you actually believe it’s Windows’ fault that iTunes is such an abysmal pig. Sigh. WINDOWS is the largest market for iPods/Phone by leaps and bounds. Vista (such as it is) existed long before the dog known as iTunes 8.0 was released. When the latter was being written, it was done so with full knowledge that tens of millions of users would be using it…wait for it…ON WINDOWS. Therefore, the onus was on Apple to provide a decent media player.
    Let’s see. Virtually every other media application works like a dream on Windows. But iTunes runs like it’s firing in lard. So it’s Windows’ fault?
    You fanboy sheep who base your coolness on what appliance you use really, really need to look at your flawed logic. I mean, you people are so blindly subservient to the cult of Mac (‘cos you’re so cool, we know) that you blame MS’ pre-existing code for the fact that your savior’s software just plain sucks? You do realize the stark depths of Stupid you’re parading, right?
    Meh. nevermind. You’re much too hip to listen to logic. I know that you’re better than the rest of us, you know, because some massive corporation and advertising campaign says you are.

    ‘Think different!’ Pfft. You’re the intellectually soft reason that trends exist, fanboy.

  48. Levi says:


    Windows FTW

    mac is covered with advertisements that glorify its over hyped cleanness of an OS. Did you know over 94% of all programmers in the world activley say they prefer windows because of its accessibility and power coding. Mac sucks because its inaccessable and boring.

    Mac = old mans operating system that you can rely on, but isnt exciting and dangerous
    Windows = for the fun types, accessible and powerful and unpredictable with access to produce code to blow your mind

  49. Mic says:

    Hahaha HipstersAreSheep you’re totally right and you even used big words to sound smart! That’s funny! My iTunes library is 500 MBs and it runs like crap, lagging for 5 secs everytime I do something. Oh… I forgot to tell you my system….. =)
    Intel Core 2 Quad Processor @ 2.83 GHz each core
    DDR3 RAM @ 1333 FSB 4 GBs (7-7-7-20)
    HD4870 1GB Graphics card
    And an Asus P5Q3 Deluxe motherboard! For goodness sake, Crysis doesn’t lag with DX10 on this system, but iTunes does! Uhhh, duh, umm ya it’s my PC. Grow a brain, look at the facts!

  50. iTunesSucks says:

    Mic said it best…. Crysis runs fine, but Itunes cant. That is a sad fact.

    I have a quadcore QX6700 with 8 gigs of ram, running Vista 64. I do high end 3d character animation for film, commercials and videogames. My system is a number crunching beast… however it can not run itunes smoothly.

    iTunes is the worst piece of software to ever have been programmed. Just what supercomputer is required for itunes to run smoothly?

    iTunes is a freaking database program with a text list. 286’s could handle that EASILY in DOS with 640K ram.

    iTunes is a joke. For all the hype about Apple, you would think that the best way to advertise your greatness, would be to actually have iTunes running smoothly. Apple wants to win over PC users… well Apple, try leading by example. Perhaps iTunes runs as best as Apple can program? Perhaps Apple really is garbage after all?

    Why in the world would i buy a MAC, full of Apple software, when they cant even get iTunes running smoothly on the FASTEST PC hardware. Which just so happens to be the same exact hardware that drives the fastest mac.

    BOO APPLE. You fail.

  51. AppleSucks says:

    Apple is fucking shit. They are not able to write, AFTER 8 RELEASES, a simple media software that is able to scroll a text list without hanging. AND THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR LIBRARY SIZE, it’s just because of bad UI programming. And this applies for the iTunes store too, which is incredibly slow to scroll/navigate on my 2.9 Ghz Core 2 Quad Extreme/4 GB Ram PC!!!

    I switched to Media Player and makes my media library experience much better. Just bad it doesn’t support iPods natively.

    And this is not Microsoft’s fault. It’s Apple. And for those who say that Mac is better than WIndows, I have both been using both operating system for years, and as an IT Professionnal, I can only say that Mac OS X really isn’t better than Windows, and both operating system have their strengths and their flaws, and Vista is better than OS X on many aspects.

  52. Ryan Drake says:

    Winamp can manage an iPod, so why even use iTunes??

  53. Xcali says:

    I have a Mac pro runs under leopard intel 2.6 core 2 duo 250 gig hdd 512 mb graphic card 4 gig internal ram 2400 euro and i have a sony Vaio intel 2.6 core 2 duo 250 gig hdd 512 graphic card 3 gig ram runs windows vista ultimate 2340 euro. Itunes work slow on both machines and freeze sometime. if i wanna use several programs at the same time its sucks on both of the machines. I have a 150 gig library on both machine and was looking wich of the machine is faster with transfering the data. i have to give this one to the sony Vaio,it was 17 seconds faster.

    I think there is no good machine with a good os.

    maybe in the future..

    i am from the Netherlands

  54. […] Klick geht mir einer Verzögerung einher, jede Aktion schent lahm zu sein. Aberanscheinend empfinde nicht nur ich […]

  55. Ferrograph says:

    Yeah Winamp is doing a good job of transfering Music to my iPod. You can actually see what its transfering and in what order.

    iTunes 8 runs dog slow on my PC too and its a decent spec dual core.

    Isnt it the case that iTunes is built to run on a MAC and so to get it to run on windows there is a layer of interpretation to be done? (MAC API calls –> Windows API calls) This is why it runs so slow. It wouldnt natively run on Windows at all, so there is a sort of virtual machine layer sat underneath it all.

    Anyway Winamp v5.541 is doing a good job for me. Yes its a little bloaty in places but its still the Media Player we all fell in love with back in the late 90’s. WMP11 is pretty good too.

  56. gEBEx says:

    Hey Guys.

    I have the same slowness issue with Itune…
    not enough ram? well, I have 8gigs
    Processor too slow? I doubt it…dual core 2 gigs 64 bits
    OS too Slow?…Na….Vista 64.
    Large DB? YES 350 gigs of MP3…. but winamp can handle this easilly
    the problem? ITUNES….it sucks….it sucks so much….
    damed! I bought an IPhone 3G…. stupid me…..

  57. Joe says:

    The problem is iTunes has two key uses for me:

    Loading songs seamlessly on to my iPhone
    Playing mixed house music mp3’s truly gaplessly.
    I’ve tried winamp, foobar etc and all of them have a noticeable gap.

    I also have a high spec pc, I run a windows home server, again high spec, over gigabit ethernet. iTunes is terribly slow!!

    The argument over fault is simpl. If you design a program for a platform it should work. Simple as that.

    • Rudy says:

      foobar can play gaplessly 😉
      Just activate the crossfader and skip silence filter on DSP. Skip silence is to ensure that your gapped file has its silence removed on the fly.

  58. Milandro says:

    Use JavaTunes!

    With Java 6, it runs lightning fast on my ubuntu box at work and both my win pcs at home. Indexes 40GB+ of music in like 10 to 15 minutes, start-up time is 15 to 20 seconds and its ram usage is far below firefox 3 (miles below itunes).

    Those numbers are amazing considering how slow my home machine is (A winxp dell inspiron 1100 with 512MB ram, has not been reformatted in 5+ years -_-) It is a simple media player that does two things right, play music and organize my library. No ipod syncing though, which kinda sucks..

    It has been happily playing back my music for 6+ months, and now i only open itunes to sync the ipod and download the podcasts (but definetely going to try and use floola for that now).
    I found it on my media player hunt when I was sick-of WMP, itunes (6+ minutes to start-up!! wtf!), foobar2000 and winamp (no linux support).

    JavaTunes is good for mac, linux and windows and I hope at least some of you find it as useful as i did!

  59. guys check my case: i have a new PC 3000+ rams procesor ICD2 T8100

    i installed itunes , i have an emty library , and its always using 50%+ of cpu
    working very bad and slow .

    in conclusion i would say that its itunes software which sucks and this makes me fell sorry about my iphone that i have just bought

  60. FuckingFedUp says:

    Haha iTunes is such a joke!! I used it to manage my iPod but it’s so painfully slow. Scrolling my library which is under 500 songs makes my computer lag. Even clicking the mouse inside the program takes forever and has a considerable lag. The worst thing was when I tried changing the Info (or mp3 tags) it could take several hours to change all the files, and my whole system would almost freeze up in the process. I had to leave my pc to do other things while the process was running. Actually it consumed so much resources that my video card crashed and my screen went black. Windows did restart the video card again after iTunes released some resources though.

    After reading this thread I saw that Winamp could manage my iPod, and boy what a change!! No lagging and lightning fast response! I tried changing the ID 3 tags for the same amount of songs in winamp, and it took only seconds. No resources consumed whatsoever. Holy shit why haven’t I switched before? So many countless hours wasted trying to manage my iPod library.. Apple can go fuck themself, iTunes is the fucking worst program I have ever used!! Christ!

  61. itunessucksdonkeyballs says:

    itunes problem is not windows related , i have a pretty small library maybe a couple gigs, highend system (intel quad cpu, and 4gb of ram) and itunes takes a year to boot up

  62. Bolthole says:

    Yes… but WHY does iTunes run so slowly… does anyone actually know? If someone does, maybe we can then start making suggestions as to how we can improve it?

  63. GB says:

    As all the others have said before me, iTunes is painfully slow. It’s not Windows, it’s just that iTunes is poorly written software. It is a poorly written, custom interface not taking advantage of standard Windows dialogues.

    Even with my quad core Xeon processor and 4GB of RAM, iTunes sucks. I will not be buying another iPod. The last two I received as gifts or I would not own them either.

    Apple builds great hardware devices – elegant, simple designs. And they are masters of branding and marketing. But softward is just not their thing, especially on other platforms.

  64. Baldrel says:

    What is it with people disliking iTunes i own both Mac and PC and every time i use it on each it gives me some sort of strange pleasure to use. It has a beautiful interface and it has everything you would need.
    In fact i think the itunes experience is better than any wmp (i used 11), or winamp (cant remember what version i used but it sucked), the only itunes that has ever annoyed me which is the current one i am using (8.02) and that only annoys me because it is a bit slow on my ibook g4.
    i have never used it on vista though.
    by the way i am an Apple FANBOY!!!.

  65. rhett says:

    Itunes is terribly slow. I am using Vista 64bit with a Core 2 Duo E6320, 6GB of RAM (yes, 6GB), and a RAID-0 7200rpm disk array. There is nothing slow about this machine. Yet, iTunes crawls.

    I am no longer buying from iTunes. I will switch soon, after converting all my purchased music to MP3. I’ve had enough. Apple makes shit products.

  66. Roflknife says:

    LOL. that sucks for you guys. i have a laptop with an 80G library and iTunas Dosent miss a beat. Win XP its a little slow but still runs correctly. i can play games like Halo Half-Life 2 and Garrys Mod while iTunes is running in the backround. i guess im just lucky

  67. Nilm says:

    I followed Stephen’s suggestion and it actually speed up a lot.
    Apple really should default these two checkbox. (but, of course, it will copy another set of music files) Try it.

    Stephen Says:

    February 21st, 2008 at 7:52 am

    I’m running 40Gigs of music and it’s lightning fast !!

  68. Alex says:

    Apple needs to work on the interface it’s a bit slow. Apple has had quite a bit of time to get it right but they haven’t.

    qx6700 @ 3.5gh, areca sata 3tb raid 5 (4 1tb wd drives),138gb raptor stripe, 8gb ddr2.

  69. Daniella says:

    i think atm its not our fault its something to do with itunes because all my friends is stuffing up, i thought it was just mine at first because i had the first nano and that it was to old or something but yeah.

  70. Dick says:

    I am currently running on a intel i7-965Extreme 3.2GHZ <–top as of now, with dual 1gb Nvidia Geforce GTX 280 GPUs, 6GB DDR3 of ram, 2TB SATA running on windows vista ultimate. Everything is top of the ladder and itunes still lags. Obviously its the programming for itunes for windows. not PCs themselves. all the mac fanboys out there need to stfu. I find it hilarious when people say “PC”< Mac

    PC’s have more Horsepower than macs morons. Mac Pros are still using intel xeon which is generations ago. They are made for graphical work and nothing more. The only good thing the Mac Pro has is the NVIDIA Quadro FX which is amazing in terms of graphics rendering.

  71. alex says:

    iTunes takes 2 minutes to load. Have 1 year old laptop, 15Gb of mp3s.
    Once iTunes is up, it works reasonably fast…

    Will surely try Foola – thanks for the pointer.

  72. alice says:

    i thought it was my computer and so bought new one. Re-sinstall itunes and it’s even SLOWER! what gives? wish i researched first to see that itunes is slow for everyone. but wanted to add that its now even WORSE!

  73. Justin says:

    Stefan H. – purchasing a Mac will not make your portfolio any better. That should certainly be apparent.

  74. Tifta says:

    I think everybody has problem with itunes. it uses so much memory usage. I have 2 OS in my PC, Vista Ultimate and XP, itunes can running well on XP, but not on vista. It takes so long time just for loading, and I’ve decided for not using itunes anymore, it was really sucks. Winamp and WMP 11 are much better. I don’t know if apple did it intentionally.

  75. slushe says:

    feels a bit faster in windows 7 not by much…still cant leave that genius window open though. kills everything

  76. Anders says:

    Hi everyone!

    Lots of complaints in here…so Im not going to post another one. This post has been going for a year soon!! Instead I just recommend all of you this Floola program, which some people in here mention but wont specifically tell us if its good or not.

    Simple, quick and works just as it should. (Tested in Vista 32 bit).

    Go for it, screw Apples failure to software and enjoy the music!


  77. John says:

    The buy a Mac because iTunes is slow is a joke.. iTunes is SLOW. WinAmp can have all 40,000 of my songs in a playlist and be peppy on my computer.. iTunes can barely function. I’m sorry, it’s not the computer, it’s iTunes… it’s a wretched, bloated program that tries to take over every aspect of your media.

    If I didn’t have an iPod Touch, I’d kick it to the curb.

  78. Andy says:

    I have both a Macbook and a Windows machine.
    Mac with 1GB RAM running iTunes 8.02 with 80GB music on external drive is slow.
    Windows Vista Quad core 4GB RAM, 500GB 10krpm mirrored drives, 512MB video with 80GB music on external drive is UNBELIEVABLY slow.

    30-60 secs to respond to any mouse clicks, 2-3 mins to load.

    If I run iTunes with my external drive disconnected it deletes the contents of my playlists.

    Its the buggiest, flakiest piece of crapware I have ever come across, and if thats the quality that Apple are producing in future, they can stick their lousy products up their butts.
    The only reason its still on my machines is because I use it to sync my Outlook to my iPhone near enough continuously.

  79. […] If you want to look at the article comment, click here. […]

  80. Tradakk says:

    This is ridiculous.
    I have a Dell *ducks below Mac users’ fists* and it’s worked brilliantly for the past year, being slow only MAYBE once a month, when I need a software update for a program or two.
    Then I bought an iPod.
    iTunes is horrible on my computer. When I click the icon, it takes a few minutes just to open the main page, and then it goes unresponsive for anything I click on besides my library, which, btw, only has a hundred and thirty songs because I’m unable to actually DO anything in the iTunes store. >.>
    I’m sick of it; if this doesn’t get any better I’m going with a Zune or Sansa first chance I get.

  81. Tradakk says:

    Also, (and sorry for the double comment), I’ve tried every solution I can think of (as I’m pretty good with computers), including the one listed above my first comment, and no improvement has ocurred. T_T

  82. Hey Folks!

    In some kind of situation, the elevation of the priority of the process may help.

    Try: Right click the taskbar -> Start Task manager -> Processes -> Right-click iTunes.exe ( *32 ) -> select “set Priority” -> Realtime.

    As it now owns the right to directly use your computers resources, it should be faster.


  83. j says:

    Have to report a problem to Apple Customer service with a movie rental. The customer service process on iTunes is probably costing me $200 in time. Sort of ridiculous for a $0.99 rental.

  84. j says:

    iTunes must be loading the song information from your library into memory, which will slow down everything when the library is large.

    This is necessary for some usages, but not others. The program needs some re-tuning.

  85. Tim Troy says:

    I have XP with ITunes and tried loze’s suggestion and I am pleased. Much better experience.

    # loze Says:
    March 1st, 2008 at 3:35 am

    itunes 7.6.1

  86. Yuniverse says:

    I have Vista Ultimate with core2duo 2.16 GHz desktop with 3GB RAM and my itunes was SO slow and buggy…. That is until I TURNED OFF THE GENIUS!!!!

    I don’t know if anyone had already suggested, but turning off the Genius (which i don’t use anyways) sped up my iTunes significantly!!!

  87. EricBB says:

    I had performance problems with iTunes on vista Business. I greatly reduced them by the following:

    first of all I dissabled the indexing of xml files (controlpanel indexing)

    secondly I turned off genius, search for shared libs, iTunes store, search for apple TV’s, search for Air tunes speakers, search for ipod remotes, keep itunes organised and copy itunes music…

    thirdly, my anti virus software (F-Prot) hogged the start-up process. I still have to find out if other anti virus software does the same. Anyway, when i changed the automatic scanning to MS-office only, my problem was solved. before that it took about 30-40 seconds for iTunes to start up, now only 6 or 7seconds. problem ofcourse is that my anti virus protection is has been weakened by that… you can test if this is your problem by temporarily dissable your anti virus…

  88. Chortle says:


    You truly are a monumental apple fan boy retard.

    iTunes, like many Apple applications, is an inefficient, illogical, DRM filled, unnecessarily eye candy laced POS which Apple forces upon technologically unsavvy ( like you ) people who prefer looks over substance.

  89. Brandon says:

    I’ve been wondering why this is so bad as well. It’s actually very hard to believe, as you wouldn’t expect something like this from a name such as Apple. I’m PC is extremely fast and iTunes is SNAIL SLOW. My library is probably around 100GB. CPU – Quad Core Q9450 6MB cache. 4GB DDR3 RAM. Intel DX38BT mobo. I run Vista Ultimate x64. There is NO logical reason why this app should crash from me clicking from music to ‘Podcasts’!!!

  90. Me says:

    I have a 350 GB collection with over 900 audio books. Winamp doesn’t distinguish between audio books and music, so it makes it a pain to manage. Even Winamp took 6.3 seconds to load my library. I have XP running because Vista is so stinkin’ slow on all apps I use. My computer is a few years old, but I have 2 GB RAM and I can run intensive games on it with no slowdown. It’s iTunes, and it’s a shame because for an audio book listener, what they have is great except for the speed.

    I can listen to multiple books and go back to where I left off on each one – can’t do that with my old Creative MP3 players. Any suggestions for audiobook-capable iTunes-compatible ipod/iphone manager?

  91. maxhuber says:

    ^^ this has helped. THANKS!

    after that: disable sharing, enable importing, turn off look for remote speakers connected with airtunes, turn off look for iphone and ipod touch remotes, turn off look for apple TV, turn off automatic updates,

    ^^ maybe this will help you!


  92. Disgusted says:

    This thing is a joke! I get one album ripped, and the program freezes and then I have to Task Manager to stop it. Then I have to wait for several minutes to get it going again so I can rip another one. Will someone please tell me why Apple hates people who use computers?

  93. John says:

    @Stefan: I have 260GB of music and iTunes chokes on that. You said before that “70Gig of music files all in different locations is a lot of work for iTunes to keep track of”… I’m sorry, but if I can write a Visual Basic program to manage my music that doesn’t lag then a multinational corporation with a programming staff should be able to do the same damn thing.

    All I want is this:

    1.) View or search files.
    2.) Copy those to the iPod Touch

    That’s IT! And Apple can’t seem to pull that off without a huge lag. I mean, even scrolling through the music box. For God’s sake, put settings in that let us disable whatever worthless feature that I’m not using is bogging down the UI. This doesn’t make me want to switch to Apple, it makes me want to sell my iPod and buy another brand that just lets me copy files to it without jumping through hoops. Don’t even get me started on the fact that I can’t plug it into the fucking wall without buying an extra adapter piece. I mean, who the fuck has a USB port near them all the time when the crappy ass battery stops holding a charge.

    I love my iPod Touch, but by god if there aren’t things that I can’t stand about what I have to do to use it. If I hear another zealot say “but it just works” I’m going to puke. It just works, except when it doesn’t.

  94. Ricardo says:

    I’ll run a pc till i die. Funny thing is, if apple does as great as they want buy selling more macs, they will finally obtain the interest of virus creators. lol. The itune problem is rediculous and i would not be surprised if they windows version has something in it that purposely makes it run slow.

  95. Matt L says:

    I have 4 gb of ram, a 4gb media library, and have done Stephen’s suggestions. Itunes still sucks.

  96. Caroline says:

    I got both a mac and a pc and i do NOT see any difference, so stop the mac-glorification coz itunes run just as slow on both machines.

    I loved itunes a little year ago because it was a fast and simple software, now it just seems to slow down even further every f*** time i update.

    i think many software creators think they have to put as much into the software because computers have more capacity now, instead of giving the bliss of a easy and smooth running program.

    atm i’m looking for something else, coz this is just a pain…

  97. Felix Turner says:

    UPDATE: I’m now really liking Songbird as an iTunes alternative. It’s quality open source software a la FireFox. The UI is very similar to iTunes but seems a bit more peppy. Haven’t tried syncing it to my iPod yet.

  98. JJ says:

    iTunes is cheap crap.

    Super slow, buggy and the layout looks like it was done by a 5 year old.

  99. Jessica says:

    well itunes has always been slow some advice dont get a mac computer they are not compatible with anything

  100. Salem says:

    Just throwing my 2 cents worth in:
    I launched iTunes 5 minutes ago. nothing. And my laptop isn’t BAD either. its an asus GAMING laptop, for christ’s sake. Why must iTunes be SO slow? On top of this, iTunes’s coverflow limits itself to 10 fps, according to fraps, which I just can’t get. Maybe there’s a 3rd party iPod-syncing software that works with Winamp or Mediamonkey that doesn’t…. um, suck.

  101. Zarbles says:

    I have an old powerbook g4 1.33 ghz, 1 gb ram, 110 gb library on an external drive. itunes is decently fast except since i installed the latest version there are certain mp3s that just cause it to freeze for a bit when i try to play them… i have been trying to figure out why and it seems to be the only thing they all have in common is that in the tag the encoding lists as “unknown”. however not ALL files with unknown encoding cause problems… but some do. if i play the files directly off the drive in finder they play like normal. i tried syncing the files in itunes to my internal drive and it really sped them up, but there is still about a one second lag.
    Anyways seems like there is some sort of random mp3 encoder that itunes has some sort of issue with… extremely annoying / retarded.

  102. dusan says:

    is there any other program witch can transfer music on ipod. i have ipod touch 2g and winamp can’t recognize it.

  103. SDK says:

    I mostly use Windows. Media Monkey is a WAY better music organizer/manager. It is amazing what you can do with that program. iTunes has it’s store, movies and such, which makes it hard to ignore (much as I’d like to). But it’s ridiculous to see an application this slow on systems today (my music collection is around 12GB). Apple is totally dropping the ball here. They either fix this soon, or people will find something else. Just a matter of time. I also like to use Linux (Ubuntu), so I’m gonna re-examine Winamp (I think they have ways to buy online as well). I also hate the DRM shit.

  104. James says:

    iTunes is soo unecessarily slow, yes i run windows vista (which is pretty awesome most of the time). However hard you try you cannot blame the slowness of iTunes on microsoft… how does that work. I run all sorts of high-demand software and hardware with no problem at all, but iTunes ‘a simple’ media management program is the slowest piece of software to still exist.

    Yes my library is 50GB and is stored on a server, but in this technological era that really isn’t much to ask. The connection speed isn’t the problem and neither is the server machine… i have previously used windows media player with this setup and it works super quickly and keeps your library updated with all songs in the folder (now that is awesome, why don’t apple tag onto ideas like this), in iTunes one must import everything… why?! If it wasn’t for the iPod I would still be using windows media player!

    The iPod backup and restore function doesn’t even actually backup your iPod, it doesn’t remember the songs/videos/apps that were on the iPod so what the hell is it spending all that time backingup :S. The drag and drop feature to get songs onto your iPod is so slow it has to spend half an hour thinking about it whenever you drop something on it, more often than not it will then decide not to even bother putting it on the iPod.

    Now don’t tell me this is a problem with microsoft! I know we like to blame it on them but when it comes to Apple lets blame it on Apple 😀 they aren’t any better.

  105. Tadie says:

    I have another problem my itunes will open perfectly, it plays music perfectly, everything but the store works great. When you click the store tab it can take up to 10minutes to load and after it reaches the home screen it will usually take another 5minutes to get to the next page. After that it acts normal and there is no problem. I NEED HELP!!!

  106. […] Raid 0 and triple channel memory. It’s a really fast machine. But iTunes seems to forget that. Very disappointing. And then the Apple update popup which also wants to install programs I don’t want. Also […]

  107. Doc says:

    Is there an alternative to using itunes if you want to sync with an ipod? I completely agree it’s patheticly slow on a even a powerful pc, but how else does one get songs onto an ipod?
    Apple, no, Steve, be ashamed. Your software is complete and utter garbage!

  108. Patrick says:

    So, have we come to the conclusion that there is no way to tweak itunes to speed it up a bit?

    It’s fine on my desktop (3.00 ghz 1333 fsb, 4 gb ram, 7200 rpm hd), but my very similar dell laptop can’t do anything with itunes (2.26 ghz 1066 fsb, 4 gb ram, 7200 rpm hd). I just wish i knew what caused it to bog down.

  109. Thomas says:

    Right, to start of i am running a windows vista, 2GB memory, AMD Phenom Black edition 2.8GHz Quad Core.

    The only problem i have with itunes is the store, My library runs very smoothly with no problems whatsoever. Although, whenever i go to browse the apple store, it simply does not load, or takes 10 minutes to load each page. I am running a fast 8mb connection, and have no problems with the internet at all.

    I have heard, and i may be wrong, that itunes may be slow on PCs, because the software is simply a port from the MAC version. Why can apple juts simply write a version made for PCs?

  110. Roel says:

    I also have terrible speed issues with iTunes. It’s probably a good application if you have 15 mp3 files, but if you try to load an entire music collection of 250GB, which winamp does in 3 minutes, you need about an hour to start working. Then when you try to synchronize, it hangs or becomes so slow you just don’t wan’t to use it anymore. I have an iPhone as well, and I only connect it to a computer with no music on it. Please Apple, make something you can use to put music on an iPod/iPhone in less then 15 minutes!!

  111. Bobby says:

    Hey All, here is the answer as to why iTunes runs so slowly on Windows, especially with an iPod plugged in. The same answer also tells us why we are continually seeing iTunes updates: security (but not for you – for Apple).

    If you monitor iTunes with a certain debugger (a program designed to show low-level code other programs are executing while they run), you’ll find that iTunes is CONSTANTLY calling code on the Windows OS to find out if anyone is monitoring it with a debugging program. Windows can usually tell iTunes whether or not it is being watched by conventional means, but the test takes relatively a lot of time and processor power to do. One test every here and there wouldn’t be a big deal, but iTunes is almost constantly requesting that Windows tests for debuggers. This is especially the case when an iPod is plugged in. Hence, iTunes on Windows is extremely slow and sluggish.

    The reason behind this? Probably because this way Apple thinks it can keep its secrets hidden, like how it encrypts/decrypts DRM protected music, how it communicates secretly with the iPod Touch and iPhone, etc. The point is, Apple doesn’t want other people finding out ways to play their encrypted music or communicate with their devices. Now, innovative computer gurus are figuring it out all the time anyway, and therefore Apple is constantly changing small things in iTunes to trip them up. Therefore, they are often releasing “new” versions of iTunes for us to download. We think we’re getting bug fixes and new features, when in reality we’re just helping Apple prevent us from using hacks other people have developed to get around iTunes and iPod security.

    Anyway, if iTunes 8 were to run in a way that it would not worry about bothering Windows for debuggers, it would fly extremely fast just as in the pre iTunes 5 days. The only problem is that if you want to fix your copy of iTunes, you’ll have to edit the binary executable yourself, which is considered reverse engineering and is against the End User License Agreement.

    Moral of the story: iTunes is not slow because it is thinking a lot. It is not slow because its user interface is different. It is not slow because it is complex or feature rich. Many Windows programs do have these characteristics and run surprisingly well. iTunes is slow because Apple believes the sacrifice of speed is worth-while in order to keep us from using iPods and media in ways Apple did not intend. This will only change when Apple decides to either slacken or altogether change their security policies. So, until that happens, I’ll continue avoiding iTunes and the music store at all costs except on the rare occasion I need to back up my iPod.

  112. C says:

    I also regret buying an ipod, because I hate itunes, it suh-huh-huuuuuucks! i feel like it wants to control me!

  113. spider says:

    iTunes sucks horribly on Macs too, hey I love Macs and I make my living with them; but it’s not a platform issue– it’s a software problem. I think iTunes 6 was the last decent version on the Mac. With every upgrade it runs slower and slower and has become bloatware. If I simply scroll, the ball starts spinning and you’re hung up waiting. Change songs, get info, attach/disconnect earlier ipods (2-4th G–newer ones are a bit better) etc., same thing–crazy ridiculous. This is painful to use now and I have started use other players for listening to music. This may drive someone to come up with an app that can act as a player and sync with an ipod (although Apple would probably sue them). Therefore, Apple really needs to break this app up into multiple apps and concentrate on making each work optimally. This is long overdue and Apple needs to realize this is a problem that even having 8 cores, or 16 in the future, won’t solve. People need to complain to Apple en mass to force them to do something about it.

  114. not happy says:

    Itunes sucks heaps. Why did Apple even bother making itunes? There should atleast be a choice to use your Ipod simply as a removeable – copy and paste songs on.
    Itunes 8 doesn’t even run…

  115. itunessucks says:

    Its the single most stupid piece of software out there, it does not even warn when it starts to delete 10-s of gigabytes of information from my ipod just because they do not exist in the damn itunes library. Apple, please destroy all evidence of this crappy software and make ipod work as a normal connected device with direct windows control!!!

  116. RedZombie125 says:

    Just to clear up the Mac/PC mess – both Macs and PCs work fine; it’s just that Macs are better for video editing (because they use QuickTime instead of Microsoft’s over-blown WMV format) and PCs are better for gaming because developers write their games for Windows because Windows uses DirectX; which is one of the best game engines on the planet, next to OpenGL (which also works on Windows)… Hope that clears something up…

  117. nick says:

    Its really quite scary, I have a company laptop, personal laptop and a home PC all of which are struggling to cope with or process the latest application from apple! I have approx 60 gig of music to change from 1 library to another and am just on my 5th attemp, it sucks I should have bought a modest £60 – 100 mp4 so I could have saved on the £000’s Ive spent on PC kit (Macs are pants)#


  118. katmai says:

    if only i would have not bought that damn iphone. i can’t believe how utterly slow itunes is. i have no other applications working like this on my pc, and WMP 11 is a gem when sorting and working out with the songs. iTunes just manages to get all clogged when i click on something. God i can’t believe this. And regarding the pc … i have quite a powerful one so, it’s definitely not hardware related.

  119. Marko says:

    I would just like to throw my hat into the pot. This must be the worst application built ever purely because if you have a nice iphone or ipod or whatever other Apple product you need to use this utterly stupid product.

    I plugged in a new iPod shuffle on my latest state of the art board and it took about 10 minutes for iTunes to detect it. I tried to copy a song and i’m still waiting while typing out this entire post.

    I am not a violent person, i run my own business and have a great deal of patience with software having grown up in the early days of DOS, Unix and Windows BUT I WOULD LIKE TO PUNCH THE DEVELOPERS IN THE FACE FOR MAKING SUCH A CRAP PROGRAM

  120. Daniel says:

    I really hate itunes when the iphone came out i was so exited ” a phone by apple is wow that has to be the best phone ever but then somebody told me that it used itunes to sync media and that defenetly kill the user expirience

  121. Max says:

    Over 1TB Library and it works OK on Mac and PC . The only problem is that when you import 1TB worth of mp3’s you have to wait a whole day ! . Hold on im not even importing Im adding to the library without copying !!! WTF? and then it decides to add album art automatically and determine gapless playback information – THAT YOU CANNOT TURN OFF in the the settings – WTF? not good enough apple!. makes you wonder what they use as a backend to the itunes store… “iTunes?” I think not!

  122. Cash From Turlock says:

    I’m an IT consultant in California and can honestly say in the past 8 years, the only way I’ve been able to get iTunes to run bearably, is by installing it BY ITSELF on a PC, running XP64bit with 5 gigs of memory. When I say by itself I mean by downloading a program called nlite and stripping the shit out of XP… after you’ve installed the OS, only install the 64bit version of iTunes and your music of course. Nothing Else! no AV, no Outlook… NOTHING!

    Just as a side note… I use a mac book as my primary laptop. BUT, I dont use Mac OS… I run Windows7 on it. Because Apple knows there software is SHIT… They made a smart move and added a application to Leopard called Bootcamp witch allows you to do this.

    I love it when I’m at Starbucks and some dip shit Apple fanboys come up to me and says “nice mac book” and in turn destroy his pathetic emo world when I show him Windows7 rocking the show. hehehe!

  123. When I didn’t have iPod Touch, I really didn’t want to use iTunes because it installs all sort of shits that I don’t need such as QuickTime, Bonjour, iPodService, MobileSupport and so on. I’m not concerning about hard disk spaces because I have plenty, but the problem was those shits such as QuickTime change my system settings deliberately. Channing protocol, file association, running background processes, modifying network settings…. The only reason I installed it on my PC was to discover and listen to pod casts. I know there are many alternatives, but iTunes was the most easy one to access many pod casts with. After installing iTunes there were many background services running all the time which I don’t even need. Couldn’t it just ask me which components to install? Why did I need to run iPodService all the time when I didn’t even have an iPod?

    Anyways, now that I have an iPod Touch, I have completely no other choice but to use iTunes. I don’t use iTunes as my music player so my library is empty (I use manual sync). But why is iTunes so incredibly slow? Whenever I click another item on the left bar it hangs. I have 4GB of system memory and a dual-core E6300 CPU, isn’t that enough? Windows Media Player (my main music player) and WinAmp run smoothly just with no problems, why is only iTunes slow? I just don’t get it. Apple should have professional programmers to write softwares…

    What kind of system do I need to use iTunes without lagging? An i7 Extreme CPU and say 16GB of ram? Just to sync songs to a portable music device? Really? Is that it?

  124. Christian Schroer says:

    very simple; mac sucks..period

  125. Ramin says:

    If you want to add/remove songs from your library, and sync your podcast to your iPhone, then don’t bother with opening iTunes at all!!! Just install MediaMonkey (the free edition) and it will allow you to bypass the shitty iTunes and never open it again. It will allow you to add/remove songs/albums without syncing.

    Note: you have to install itunes before installing MediaMonkey because it needs the iPhone drivers installed with itunes. However, you don’t need to open iTunes, never. You only need it installed. That’s all.

  126. Baldrel says:

    Its funny, i love iTunes on mac and pc.
    The only problem i have is that itunes starts to slow down once you reach around the 10000 song mark. (i currently have 12000).
    But itunes is getting better and better (itunes 9 is really good), and i expect apple will eventually fix the slowness.

    As for windows Vs mac os x (not pc vs mac), i love os x (currently tiger, but moving to leopard), i hate vista, i LIKE xp (but not love it), and i am excited about windows 7 (looks like windows is finally going to be usable). If i had to leave itunes for pc i would go for media monkey (gold version), and for mac i would rather lick piss from a nettle (rather than give up itunes).

  127. JBland says:

    All of you are right. I tunes is a bad program. I have 2 PC’s 1 Mac plenty of ram, plenty. Everthing runs fine except for ITunes!!!

  128. Joey says:

    I can’t afford to switch to a Mac. Why should I anyways? I don’t want to use an OS made by insane people with no money sense. We’re in a fucking recession, and the prices of a Mac is still around 8million dollars per centimeter.

  129. albalex says:

    My mac with itunes for all versions have been exponentially slower than win amp back in the day. Loading and verifying the library in the beginning makes it so bad.

  130. Joe says:


    I just bought a macbook pro. Great machine, but itunes is no good. Takes FOREVER to add songs to the library. Missing WMP….

  131. Mario Manzella says:

    I find Itunes to be the slowest and most inefficient program I’ve ever operated. It takes over my system and won’t allow me to add new music, photos or podcasts without deleting all my previous files. It’s so stupid. I will never buy another Ipod, and as a teacher of esl abroad, I will make sure that my students will not either, if I can convince them.

  132. Andrew says:

    It is quite possible the worst thing I have ever used. You have no idea how insanely slow it is. After the Itunes 7.0 + versions came out, I just wanted to shoot myself while waiting 5 minutes for it to un-freeze every time I click on something. For Gods sake, it took me 4 DAYS to get my 500 songs in the exact condition I wanted them to be, due to the freezing and ‘Determining Gapless Playback” which just goes over the same 20 something songs over and over and over without any changes. Take in fact that it takes roughly 2 minutes for it to just determine ONE song (I counted).

    I have given up using it. I have not opened Itunes nor plugged in my Ipod or Iphone for months in fear that I would stare at Itunes pointlessly as it does God knows what. I’m not upload anything anymore. I am on the verge of a psychological breakdown. It has been a year + since this has been going on and I am sure that Apple knows this. However, they aren’t doing SHIT!

  133. Wallace says:

    Itunes is horribly slow. It is having problems deleting a song from my playlist right now because it is also converting a movie file so that i can put it on my ipod. Has apple ever heard of multitasking? 2.4GHz quad-core with 8Gb of ram. Definitely not the computer so Itunes is to blame.

  134. Carlo says:

    Having the same problem, I’m just trying to upload a few videos to my iPod touch (500 mb worth) and it’s been so painful, here I am 15 minutes later and I’ve only been able to upload 3 videos, I guess mac is good at making things look pretty but not very functional… I was planning on getting an iPhone but I’m starting to get really disappointed about iTunes that I think I’ll better get a droid.

  135. dmangstar says:

    Just got a new i7 920…itunes is the only thing that runs slow…it gets worse with every release.

    I want to dump itunes, but i have 5 years worth of rating that seem to be “un-exportable” from itunes, which just sucks because i need them (I DJ and ratings help me pick the songs).

    Bobby, I would like to see your source for your Apple conspiracy theory, as the way you described debug checks could be nothing further from the truth in terms of low-level operation.

  136. doug says:

    i mjust load half of the cd say u have 20 songs just load 10 it will fast then remove your cd and uncheck the first ten llittle boxes and reload the cd and it will load the second 10 songs fast it works it is just a time consuming

  137. Steve says:

    I have a really fast PC (core 2 quad @ 3.00 ghz w/2GB of ram) that is running on Windows 7 x64. This is the ONLY program I have found that slows my computer down. I use handbrake to convert my videos, and even with it running at ~95% of my CPU usage, my computer is still responsive. How is it that itunes is even worse than that? When I plug in my iPod (nano 3G), my system hangs for at least 15 seconds while itunes takes its sweet time loading it. When I add a new video/song to my library, it takes about 10 seconds for it to actually start copying into my folder. I have tried many things to fix this. When I first downloaded itunes, I dissabled QTtask.exe and ituneshelper.exe from msconfig. It still runs slow! If anybody can shed some sight on this situation that would be great. Also, is Floola any good? The only reason I have itunes is because I have an iPod. Microsoft makes Microsoft Office for mac, and it works well. Why does Apple have to be so difficult?

  138. DERP says:

    Everyone who claims that this is Microsoft’s problem is clearly a fucking moron. It’s like saying
    “Hey, this cake doesn’t taste good, I’m not going to blame the baker though, I’m going to blame the plate the cake is on, because that is how flawless my logic is”
    Mac clearly has a vendetta against Windows because of its success, and I don’t mean performance wise, I mean monetary success.
    Apple, pull your head out of your ass. I love iPods, iPods are great, but seriously, stick to iPods, and shove your shitty computers, programs and fanboys up your ass

  139. Derek says:

    So i can say this. I have a sizeable library on my PC 97 gigs of music. I also made the mistake of buying an iPod. After reading numerous posts about mac this or PC that. I came to realize. You all are really stupid. I have a quad core PC with 8 gigs of ram 1TB hard drive space on 4 hard drives run raid 5 and dual HD Radeon 5890 graphics cards. With Windows 7. So tell me this WHY does iTunes still run slow. I can’t understand it personally. Ive read countless posts on how to fix it tried all the nifty little fixes. But its just depressing that like Steve said above me Microsoft put out Office for a mac and it runs flawlessly, I know Ive tested it. But why then does Apple screw every PC user who buys an iPod in the bumhole?

  140. Jessicaaa says:

    I agree. itunes is extreamly slow. I just got an ipod touch for christmas and tried to download itunes, its been almost 2 hours i think. and its still installing

  141. fujisaki says:

    hey why does it do this its so slow !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

  142. Michelle says:

    I’ve been trying to download a free digital download of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ALL DAY!!! iTunes is going slower than I’ve ever seen ANY machine…even one on dial up! I have a cable connection to internet…it’s not my connection. It’s not a high user volume for 24 hours…especially at 1:30 a.m.

    Why is it that something “simple” is never simple! Had to go through all kinds of songs and dances just to get to the point of it even trying to download the movie. This is horrible!

  143. Simon says:

    Sorry, converted to a MAC from PC and heading back to PC, don’t believe the hype – I use iTunes on a brand new MacBook Pro 2 months old. Bought a movie from iTunes took 2 days to download. Hired a movie also for 48 hours, that is going to take 50 hours to download – not to worry iTunes enabled me to play the movie then stopped which means I will get my film 2 hours after the rental expires.

    On my second MacBook Pro, both developed machine faults, first was a kernel issue, and this one 2 months into owning it and the left internal fan has gone.

    Leading me to ask the questions…. Why do we choose Mac over PC? Is it because Mac delivers what they promise? Is it because Mac equipment is better made? Is it because Mac service is much better than a PC? Or is it because we stupidly believed the hype, and in fact they are all just as full of it as each other?

  144. steve says:

    As we can see from nearly 2 years of complaining apple simply dont care what we think. I know people have said that it is in their interests to make itunes useable but, to be honest, i think they can’t be arsed because they have us by the goolies.

    You bought an ipod

    You have no choice

    Thats the way they see it, we spent our readies on a piece of equipment that forces you to buy all your media from them, they are happy. Money in the bank screw you all now its too late.

    The only way it will change is if the public stop buying ipods, and lets face it, that just isn’t going to happen.

    We all made a deal with satan Jobs without reading the small print and now we have to burn for all eternity in the itunes torture chamber!

  145. iTunes just sucks.

    Stop defending it.

    The only reason we use it is because we need to sync our iPhones.

    I am waiting an hour for iTunes to import a 100K playlist.

  146. suomonona says:

    If you think that a Mac is better than a PC, or vice-versa, perform these 10 simple tests on both computers.

    1. Completely drop both computer’s antivirus, browse the web for a couple hours, and see which one lasts the longest.
    2 Compare overall compatibility. Can one computer run both Operating Systems?
    3. Compare overall benefits: What features does one have that the other lacks?
    4. Compare overall aesthetics: Which one looks better?
    5. Go to both of the manufacturer’s websites. Which is less pressing in it’s advertising?
    6. Look up the history of computers’ manufactures. Which invented more technologies?
    7. Count the fan-clubs, cults, and churches regarding each one. Which computer does the world not only like, but love?
    8. Compare mottos and motives. What sounds better: ‘Think Different’, or ‘Buy a PC’?
    9. Look up the world’s most widely used media program and note it’s developer. (Be careful what you say: you’ve had it yourself at one point)
    10: Which computer can used in public with pride?

    I think the answer is clear, because I Think Different.


  147. Lee says:

    “I think the answer is clear, because I Think Different.”

    Yeah so different you’re spouting the exact same nonsense as every other fanboi

    11. Eat more apples
    12. Which one is silver?
    13. Which one looks best in a trendy coffee bar?
    14. Spend twice as much money, you know because it looks great and all that
    15. Sync your ipod and browse the web, and update your blog, because who needs to actually get any work done anyway?

    Think different, what a joke. There’s a hell of a lot more ‘different’ out there than your mac.

  148. Jared says:

    These comments are supposed to be about itunes, not a mac/pc fight like in the commercials.

  149. Joey says:

    In response to suomonona….
    Don’t know what your looking at online, but mines still going strong.
    Yes in fact I have osx, ubuntu x64, ubuntu server, win7 x64, and vista x64 on my dell.
    Umm biggest thing for me is the lack of support for graphically intense games in mac, also the propietary hardware, and also lack the newest cutting edge hardware. Last I checked mac only offers one desktop with a i7 processer and I have one on my laptop. There is not one macbook pro that will come near to the performance my dell laptop can achieve.
    4. Compare overall aesthetics: Which one looks better?
    Aesthetically my win7 looks beautiful, the aero interface is amazing. The mac interface is also amazing.
    There both pressing in there advertising, hence why they are “manufacturere’s” websites.
    Umm currently I live in the present and what is on the market NOW.
    Love can be led blindly.
    Think different does.
    I would say the most widely used media program is youtube, I think i read that 20hrs of video is uploaded every minute. I don’t think youtube was made by Windows or Mac, but it was probably developed on a Windows os.
    10: Which computer can used in public with pride?\
    My dell of course, especially knowing that it can beat every mac in terms of performance and nearly any pc laptop.

    Now back to the topic. I can run itunes great on my laptop. It runs at about 26,000k of memory and doesnt even use enough cpu to count as 1% of my total processing power. Now on my older desktop it boots painfully slow and uses almost half the processing power 🙁 But after about a minute it boots and runs smoothly. The only reason its on that computer is so the rest of my family can update there ipods. On the other hand I use my windows mobile phone as my music player. I can add songs and video from ANY computer onto it and play them fine.

    I would recommend updating your machine if you can’t run itunes, Its a really low profile application and if it’s lagging your cpu then im sorry but your machine is just out of date, or bogged down with crap.

  150. Willie says:

    Look at the top, if itunes is indexing your music or something like that it becomes INCREDILY slow
    it will speed up after it finishes

  151. ACID says:

    I have been getting the same problems,
    bought the new 27″ iMac,
    backup my entire itunes data from the 24″ imac and thrown it onto the 27″,
    from past experience iTunes has always been slow since version 7 came out,

    i was hoping it be quicker on the new mac but same thing,
    i got a HP touchsmart down stairs used strictly as a media tv and music and video sync from itunes,
    and that runs slight better then the new imac,
    only difference is the new imac has my entire apps folder as well,
    which is close to 2000 apps now…

    Apple seriously need to pull the finger out there arse,
    and sort itunes out,
    its crap no matter on what windows or apple platform,
    the only time its any good,
    is when you only have 1 or 2 alburm installed,
    the more you store the more crapy it gets…

  152. ACID says:

    forgot to mention,
    my iphone sync fine on the mac,
    but when i connected my ipod and click on the syn apps button on the top it does nothing,

    if only it was more of a open source program,
    could have stripped the help out of itunes to make it run better…

  153. itunes sucks says:

    Itunes is a fucking piece of fuck. If I’d known how fucking slow the install is, and how slow the damn program is, I’d have never bought a fucking ipod.

  154. irisc says:

    I have an empty library, core i7, 8 gb RAM and itunes says that it will take 19 hours to download an hd movie????

  155. Marc says:

    urgh, itunes sucks now just like it did when it came out. Why are they still clining to this piece of shit?! I really hope they have started fresh with itunes X like with QuickTime X.

    So, heres a thing for you. I have a brand new iMac, running 10.6.2 and Windows 7 x64.

    I have a NAS, with a Music folder containing 6GB of music. Not much yeah?

    I point Windows Media Player 12 (best media player there is, bar none) at this network folder and it immediately starts to fill up its lists. While its doing this I can play music and stuff while its aggregating. Which by the way took less than a minute until it was finished, then i spent a good few minutes downloading meta-data. So. It filled up its library (without copying anything!) in less than a minute.

    I switch over to 10.6 to let iTunes do the same.

    For you see, I have an iPod so need to fill it up using iTunes (yes I know about the alternatives, and they will be used from now on).
    So, I tell iTunes the same thing. I have pointed it in the direction of the Music folder.
    iTunes immediatly grinds to a halt. Out comes the beach balll. A little window pops up to show its progress.
    I began this at 9pm.
    It is now Midnight, and still iTunes is not available.
    It finally finished adding stuff to its library an hour ago, it then went on to downloading the album artwork, and now it is “Determining Gapless Playback Information” for 984 songs, currently at 611.



    this is with the option to NOT copy stuff to its own library and to NOT touch the audio.

    So, 4 hrs later I still CANNOT listen to music.

    WHY can I NOT do anything with iTunes while its importing.

    What an utter piece of shit. Please please please Apple do the right thing and throw itunes out the window and build a new one.

    I see that Aperture 3 allows you to actually use the program while its importing, and it has UI design from QuickTime X. Perhaps this is a sign of the future? Of new UI design coming to iTunes X and the rest of OSX hopefully for 10.7.

    Shame we have to suffer being shovelled shit by Apple till then and be expected to comply.

    So, score a win for Windows 7 and WMP12.

  156. Dimeon says:

    I have a PC running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with 8GB of DDR 800MHZ RAM (It could be faster, but this was the max my Quad Core AMD Phenom 940 Black Edition would run at the time on the motherboard). My music library is nearly 300GB, with over 30k songs. WMP12 takes about an hour to build it’s library which includes the album art/metadata stuff. I usually just leave it alone and let it do its thing.

    I also have the latest version of iTunes 9.whatever it is now…..It takes a good 10-20 seconds to load and when I point it at my single music folder to build the library…something like 4-6 hours until it’s completely done! I hate it…absolutely hate it. Searching for music….you type a song/album/artist….it takes several seconds before you get any results….In WMP12, the absolute instant you type a letter to search, you get instantaneous results.

    iTunes 7 was blazingly fast on my old machine(not the one I have now) and whatever the guys at Cupertino have done, iTunes is just bloatware at it’s finest.

    A friend has a brandnew 27″ iMac with 8GB of RAM and an Intel Dual Core at 3.06Ghz….same version of iTunes that I have….you click in the icon on the dock…the icon bounces once, and alomst a second time and boom….open. Music searches in iTunes on his MAC are instantaneous, but, in all fairness, his library is maybe 30GB.

    I simply hate iTunes…..I’m not a Mac fan, but I do admit they make good stuff, but come on, I don’t have a slow machine by no means and iTunes shouldn’t be this slow.

  157. Jon Bonjovi says:

    It’s that damn genious bar. all it does is slow up everything. I regret installing that piece of shit. It isn’t helpful, and it slow up my machine.

  158. Anton says:

    All this naggin about iTunes, yes, the sw is slow on a PC, even brand new. I have both PC’s and MAC’s Brand a brand new Mac Pro and the SW isn’t all that hot there either.

    Want a fast SW app to replace iTunes, use Songbird http://www.getsongbird.com, want a real change, switch to Ubuntu keep your year old PC and it works like a brand new desktop!, Further more, its default music app will rock your iPOD.

    Want a real life change, drop the iPOD and get a generic MP3 player, guess what, with that you won’t complain about iTunes any more.

  159. Mike says:

    Damn, that’s crazy…

  160. Ric says:


  161. sam says:

    to all of you people saying to buy a mac, NOOOOO!!!! pure evil!!! pc all the way!!!!

  162. TJ's iPod says:

    iLove (some of) my touch. iHate iTunes. iUsed Macs and PC, but switched to a Linux Flavor called Ubuntu. iLove Ubuntu and despise Macs for there security weakness, and PCs for being so ..PC-ish.. iWill never forgive Apple for scaring my childhood with there crap software. iGive up, its been 4 years.. wheres my drink(sprite!)?!

    iGive up,
    15 year old ubergeek

  163. Alan says:

    It was a ton of fun paging down through these pages and pages of subliterate children bickering about Apples and PCs. The only intelligent thing here is Bobby’s post. Has anyone ever looked at the processes list for the iTunes app? It’s huge. And the real bad part is that people just put up with it. Do what you’re told. It’s better that way.

    Meanwhile, does anyone know an an alternate method (not iTunes) for logging tracks into Gracenote?


  164. tuu says:

    fuck mac and apple. My ipod and iphone takes all night to sych. i don’t know why those stupid muther fuckers at apple made it impossible to cut and paste like a blackberry. itunes is the worst piece of shit ware i ever used! and if they would put out such garbage why the fuck would i buy a fucking mac?

  165. NORDS says:

    Sooo SLOW!!!!!!!!! Just to make a save of my ipod takes forever!!

    Apple sucks for this!!!

  166. FedUpWithThisBS says:

    I wish all the PC vs MAC dolts would just shut the F*** up unless they have some positive suggestions. I don’t believe for one second that Apple developers are idiots and create crappy software – nor do I think there is a conspiracy between Apple and Microsoft, placing all us foolish users in between – so please just SHUT THE FU** UP !!!

    I have 2 WINDOWS machines, 2+ gHz dual core processors, 2+ GB Ram. Identical software installed on each machine – both Dells – one a laptop, one a desktop
    iTunes works great on the desktop, and drags ass on the laptop
    so it is not a software issue – it has to be in the display drivers, hardware inteoperability, SOMETHING besides that iTunes is a crappy piece of software.

  167. John Godwin says:

    It’s 2am, I have work in the morning, and since it involves a long drive, I’ve decided to throw a couple of audio books onto my iPhone to listen I make the journey.

    Why does everyone reading that sentence know that it obviously hasn’t been as simple as that?

    Why is iTunes now hanging?

    Why does it take six or seven clicks before the program even boots?

    Why does it take so long to load?

    Why can’t I scroll smoothly through the 95 songs on my iPhone?

    Why is there always an annoying pause whenever I click on another item inside iTunes?

    Why can’t I just instantly load the playlist, transfer my songs, sort everything and then unplug my phone and go to bed?

    Why have I been trying to transfer an audiobook for the last 35 minutes?

    Why did it frustrate me so much that in order to pass the time, I typed “Why is iTunes so slow” into Google?

    This program is fucking awful. It has no redeeming features that cannot be found on far better programs. My computer is not very fast, it was the best I could buy 18 months ago, but I’m reminded that Winamp used to manage over 20,000 songs on my shitty 400mhz AMD and 64mb of ram 10 years ago, so why can’t iTunes manage 0.5% of that with a quad core Pentium and 3gb of ram?

  168. FedUpWithThisBS says:

    Well, I rolled back to my original 2006 video driver, and updated all my ID3 tags to v2.4, and downloaded all the album art for my library. While I won’t give it a blazingly fast mark, the performance improvement is remarkable, and I can at least create a playlist in under 5 mins as opposed to2 hours as before

  169. For people who are saying that it’s the size of the library, it isn’t. I barely have like 50 songs and no videos in my library and iTunes takes forever to load.
    It also can’t be the computer beacause it’s a quad core 2.6GHz machinge with 8GB of Ram. It also has a decent graphics card.
    Apple really needs to streamline or just completely start over with iTunes.


  170. Ian Cruikshank says:

    Apple’s iTunes uses an extreme amount of processor power when downloading music and esp when “processing” the files after they are downloaded. There is no excuse for this whatsoever. It isn’t Windows that’s to blame. Their program is just incredibly bloated and the iTunes store slows down the program and your computer tremendously while downloading and processing music. It takes like 2 minutes to download a song and have it ready to play. eMusic will download the song twice as fast and not slow down your computer to a crawl.

  171. John Appleseed says:

    For my laptop it takes ages to start iTunes – nothing comes up. This is how I solve it:

    1) Start task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del)
    2) Click Processes
    3) End all processes with “iTunes” in it
    4) Start iTunes again as you normally would

    Now iTunes starts in a fraction of a second.

    Hope it helped you. Else, but a now laptop, but NEVER a Mac. Damn those worthless shiny toys.

  172. Yodds says:

    My PC has a good spec, runs XP with no problems, games etc… a nice meaty graphic card but itunes runs slow. The library is 70GB large. Looking over the threads etc ppl have commented how a 40GB library is fine.

    I have used linux and amorak ran perfectly with no lag on the same setup and set of 70GB MP3 files…

    One can only assume if the issues are both the same with Mac and PC the library is the issue. The data is held on XML files which is obviously is not reading efficiently. Amorak (I suspect) uses the Postgresql or Mysql database which when you query is super fast.

    The apple developers need to include a database feature (much like amorak has) into its build. However these will no doubt come at a cost… I mean would you pay to use itunes if it was super quick?

  173. jim says:

    I have many of the same issues as some of the posts above. It seems there are just too many cooks in the kitchen at Apple. Every time I get program update for Itunes alert and download it, it is over 110mb. That tells me that they are basically rewriting the whole program..

    Example – I initiated the download on a 18mb comcast with speedboost line. Dowload didn’t take that long. However the “install” has been running for over 30 minutes now! I have an Intel dual core 2.19 Ghz dell with 2gb of ram. So while I’m not state of the art, I should have plenty of juice to run this.

    As someone stated above. Just look at all the processes apple runs, Itunes helper, quicktime and others at start up. Even if I remove those from the start up menu, this app still runs like a dog.

    I’ll be speaking with my hacker/cracker friends to crack my itunes library and migrate it to zune or some other simple media d-base that doesn’t require a degree in database management to administer.

  174. FedUpWithThisBS says:

    I have scoured many postings concerning slow iTunes performance and one common thread seems to be present. It is not library size, processor speed,RAM, or that it is a PC – rather it seems that a lot (read-not all) problem systems are Dell laptops – Why? What does Dell do to their systems that others do not?

  175. rune_nor says:

    Well, I just got an iPhone 3GS (for free. My first thought was “yaay” – and then it all went downhill), and after having read “quick-start” instructions, figured I’d have to start up iTunes again on my 3-year old Dell Inspiron (which isn’t that good itself, I’ll admit). Note that this hasn’t been done in about a year, due to… Well, the long-established fact that iTunes sucks, combined with that I broke my old iPod Touch… About a year ago.
    It’s still up-to-date, though, due to it insisting on these pointless updates every now and then. After it finally starting up, I realize that I have 14 000 dead links to songs on it. I then figure I’ll just select and delete it all.

    Not that simple.

    After shutting the program down through Task Manager a few times, I find it takes 1-1,5 seconds to delete music – FOR EACH SONG. It’s completely non-responsive while doing this.

    Testing further, when deleting 10 GB of music (1650 songs), it takes forty minutes before the program even shows up on-screen. After -re-confirming- (possibly not necessary with some settings, but that’s not really the point), it takes around 25 minutes before it’s responsive again. At this rate, the remaining 12 000 songs (53 GB) should be cleaned out in just seven hours or so…

    (There may very well be some clean-up-library-button somewhere on the program that I’ve failed to notice that does this faster, but that’s hardly the point)

    If iTunes keeps operating at this rate, my iPhone should be fully updated and equipped in a few weeks. Hence the dead yaay.

    Way to go, Apple. You’ve successfully made a “wonderful, beautiful” horse-wagon, and then assigned a virtual diseased donkey to pull it around.

  176. rune_nor says:

    My problem doesn’t seem to be what many people here are struggling with…

    iTunes seems to insist on searching up every file you want to do something with (delete, in my case; it does the same for unchecking, and basically anything involving the file for the song). This takes ~1,5 seconds for each file, and so my 14 000 songs take 5-6 hours to go through. I don’t see any way around this, and so will have to wait 5-6 hours while iTunes does this annoying process.

    Well, here’s to hoping things’ll sail more smoothly from now on… 😛
    Good luck to the rest of you, hopefully this can be of -some- help.

  177. Indi says:

    Well it seems I may have been wrong thinking that my 64-bit version was just slow on itunes. I have winamp and zune but I have an iphone which I love and it requires itunes which sucks. Bad thing about it is that it should be easily fixed. *sigh*

  178. billy goat says:

    Hear ye, Hear ye….
    I have a new i7 nehalem in a 2.66 gh mbp with 8 gb of RAM, running itunes 9.1.1 (12)……

  179. billy goat says:

    IT IS A SOFTWARE ISSUE< HARDWARE is fine. I tried reinstalling with itunes 7 and the scrolling is fine…no hangs. Hmmm interesting, only happens with 9+, Let me know peeps.

  180. Sparxster says:

    I too have been pulling my hair out over iTunes on Vista. I got it becasue it was supposed to work in vista. That’s what they said! I guess it works in a way.

    The slowness is ruining it for me. I have to keep using it as I like to get podcasts on it. Though it’s slowly becoming less and less important to me now because of the slow, slow, hang, hang.

    I’m tired of reading fanboi shite that’s not relevant. Next time someone talks to me about how great Apples are I think I might end up in jail…

    I look forward to the day the bloody iPod dies

  181. Andrew says:

    Well it can’t be lib size because i have less then 1.5 gigs of music and this is the third time TODAY i’ve had to shut down my pc because iTunes froze everything. 12 hours later it still hasn’t sync’d my huge 1.5 lib. my system isn’t even that old. I just reformatted my pc because i bought a larger HD I’m running a fresh install of Win7 64bit which i was running before and never had a problem with anything other then itunes i have a 2.2 GHz processor and 2.5 gigs of ram never an issue unless i tunes is installed…

    now is it possible to sync my ipod touch with winamp? I used winamp years ago and loved it but now that I have an ipod i feel trapped into using their crappy software that put simply just doesn’t work. I don’t understand how a company can make a fortune out of producing these awesome devices and then turn around and make them impossible to use.

  182. wdt says:

    Has anyone tried Silver Juke ? Installed 2 years ago and not planning to change without a real good reason. Currently it gathers music from a home network of 7 computers,correctly tags and indents tracks,displays album artwork and does it all in the cleanest user interface I have ever experienced.
    This program is lightning fast with out even a hint of system hickup or hang/pause. Of course it does not support Ipod..but for that I still use Itunes ( slug ) for now ( has two speeds “slow” and “reverse” ) . Version is all I can stand as far as required resources and system responce times. Tried most newer versions but so far 7629 is it for me as far as Itunes goes

  183. connor says:

    i have a 167 gig library,
    just put the “organize my files for me” in the advanced tab and then its actually good
    dont be outsmarted by a computer
    its not the computer OR software, its the idiots who dont know how to use it.

  184. Alexandria says:

    way to get entirely off topic and not even answer the original question at all guys. now it’s just a bunch of grown people arguing over a dumb computer instead of fulfilling the original purpose; helping someone out…

  185. Peter says:

    iTume is the worst software I’ve ever seen, it takes over 30 seconds to delete one song from my iPod, I wonder what takes it so long? How hard is it to delete 10Mb? Seriously, not to mention iPod/iPad/etc… Cannot read flash files on the internet, when mostly everything needs flash to run it, and they expect us to surf on the internet with the iPod/Ipad/etc… when we can hardly watch videos on one simple site. Apple should remove the restrictions on Flash(Microsoft) or make a software that does the samething as flash.
    -Apple will suck until they remove the restriction on Flash.

  186. Jeremy Edwards says:

    Man iTunes isn’t that slow to the extent of it taking 2 minutes to start up. But on the other hand my computer is running Win7 Ultimate 64-bit on an Intel Core i7 980X 6-core 3.6GHz lol.

  187. Walkman1980 says:

    I know what you mean! I have the same problem on my Walkman – it takes forever to rewind my cassette tapes!

  188. jake says:

    ITunes is so slow i have managed to read this article and a large ammount of the comments and it still hasn’t loaded up

  189. Robbie says:

    Itunes is slow as kcuf on my computer ( core 2 duo, 4 g ram, fresh windows 7 installation ) and even slower with my iphone installed. Not only is it slow, but it has proven to be bloody impossible to get the damn thing to pull anything off of the itunes reliably in under 30 seconds or less ( I have still yet been able to subscribe to This American life because of it ).
    Mac my ass. Why should I have to use a POS Mac when my Iphone 4 alone doesn’t let me customize it ANYWHERE near as much as my old Pocket PC let me. Additionally, I can ONLY use s/w which Apple approves of, and no offense to the developers – but it’s all more or less the same ( How many flashlight apps can you have after all? )
    As I type this, it is taking 4.5 minutes to change the genres of 25 songs, and I did it to my Mp3’s using winamp in 20 seconds…
    Nuff said.

  190. Rudy says:

    Same thing here, and I really fed up. I need it to manage my iphone, so I am definitely stuck. Mine is Intel i7, with 12GB RAM, 6TB+ of hard drive with 2x64GB Intel SSD are in stripe RAID configuration, Win7 ultimate x64 retail, and Radeon 5800 card. It is a top notch configuration, and I can do crysis on full quality without blinking an eye. But iTunes keeps freezing for some few seconds.

    If you guys want to organize your music, I have an old trustee, powerful, and extremely light and fast foobar2000. Get it here http://www.foobar2000.org. It’s free, sounds best, feature packed, light, extensible, customizable, able to copy and paste, on the fly, mass tagging, mass convert, etc etc etc. I have 10K files of music, ranging from MP3, FLAC, lossless AAC, and APE. It reads all of them within 15 seconds. It also has a lightning fast search engine. I can type any part of the file (artist or folder or file name, or title, whatever) and it will display the matched list instantly. I said instantly, because it appears as you type the search keywords. Tagging a whole folder in less than a seconds, renaming, moving and reorganizing files in a whole folder in less than 3 seconds. And you can do all those things by right clicking.

  191. Mitch says:

    You’d think that by now “Version 9” that Crapple would be able to write decent software? Every update just keeps getting worse. I never ever liked Itunes but Steve-O says I have no choice but to use it get content onto my Ipod.

    If they improved their software with each release I might be akin to get used to it but every update just makes everything a whole lot worse …. real bloatware, it’s NOT rocket science building a media player and library !!

    Sadly software today across many of the top companies really sucks, everyone is so eager to rush out updates and never test anything, adobe, microsoft, apple, mozilla …. the list is endless, you can spend days and days fixing problems, finally get everything resolved and then one of these twat companies releases an update that screws it all up again and I’m not only referring to Windows PC’s either. I run MAC too and numerous MAC updates cause total havoc with the system or totally cause a piece of software to stop functioning, so MAC is by no means any better. Snow leopard has been a total disappointment too, my Macbook Pro runs 50% slower with it, takes 3 time slonger to startup and generally sucks now.

    I expected shite software 25 years ago but in today’s world there is just no excusing it.

    But of course if you want to sync your ipod you are stuck with Itunes because Apple decided to change their hashing algorithm preventing companies like JRiver from syncing to their devices. I sure hope they crack Apple’s hashing algorithm so I can do away with Itunes altogether.

  192. Keir says:

    I’m using a Mac Book Pro and it’s worse than a PC. I can no longer transfer lots of music without waiting for half an hour for itunes to unfreeze. I can’t delete music without another song automatically start playing with no option povided to disable it. The PC was so much more user-friendly.

  193. Bill says:

    I have the same problem, and I have a quite fast PC.
    Intel Core i7 930 @ 4.4GHz
    12GB RAM – Corsair Dominator GT
    3 x Intel X40-V SSD RAID-0
    ATi HD5870 V2

    My iTunes starts up very fast, however, when I try to update my iTouch by dragging and dropping songs into the iPod pane, it would freeze for a couple of seconds and then start copying. It is very annoying and have not experience this kind of problem in media players such as WMP, or Winamp.

  194. rick says:

    I’ve been using itunes for 8 year, i have about 50’000 songs, 500gb running on my new mbp
    because i thought my old mac was the course
    i’ve invested much time sorting my music.
    its been a nightmare. i have rebooted itunes from scratch many times
    and i believe the problem of itunes running slow.
    is due to the size of library , as i reinstall all my organized and rated data discs .
    itunes gets slower as i go. after about 200gb it starts to get silly .
    itunes is a great program for people with small library’s
    but for the collectors out there it seams so good at first. then after you have invested time in it, it takes it all away by running unbearably slow.
    mac could do something about it for sure as they did with iphoto
    but the majority of people have small library’s
    and mac are not interested in the minority

    i’ve been thinking to remove big peaces of my library into another folder as i organize and sort through stuff

    please somebody find a solution

  195. Can't Stand iTunes says:

    I have a great music library that I’ve kept organized myself over the years. It is exactly how I want it and I have no need for iTunes…except for when I want to transfer that music to my iPod. Every other MP3 player on the market lets you transfer your music to it like a USB drive. I just drag and drop my folders (albums), number them if I want them in a certain order, and I’m done. Takes me 5 minutes to load up my other (4GB+) MP3 players, but an hour to load up a 1GB shuffle. Way to go, Apple.

  196. Paul C says:

    I read through a sample of the comments above and they all seem to be going round in circles. I bought an iPod earlier this year and I installed iTunes on my Windows 7 laptop which has a dual-core CPU and 2 GB RAM. Other software runs well on the machine but iTunes is slow to the point where I now regret having not returned my iPod for a refund. I am so sick of iTunes hogging my machine and having to sit and wait for it to finish whatever time-wasting activity it engages in every time I click on something or try to scroll something.

    I have read comments from the ignorant who will say it is because I am running Windows and I get what I deserve. Well, if it weren’t for Windows PCs, Apple would be a bit-player, with a tiny market for iPods, iPads, and iPhones, because they cannot be used without a PC or a Mac, and the Mac represents a tiny proportion of the laptop/desktop PC market because they are so overpriced.

    Since Windows PCs are such an essential requirement for the sale of iPods/Pads/etc, it is bizarre that Apple do not address the problems with iTunes being slow. My only conclusion is that they cannot.

    I believe iTunes uses a translation layer in communicating with the Windows OS. That will slow it down. But other programs use translation layers too, and they don’t necessarily get this slow. (A lot of programs mediate OS interactions via a set of OS-call encapsulating functions, ie a translation layer.)

    So there must be another reason. I heard one possibility, which is that iTunes checks repeatedly for debug software that might try to debug it, and doing that might slow things down. If it is so, one must ask why they are so paranoid.

    If a translation layer is responsible for the slowness, it is rather ironic and hypocritical, considering that Apple does not want iOS app developers to use translation layers, citing reasons such as slowness and CPU-hogging, just the things iTunes suffers from.

    Of course it is not beyond the wit of programmers to run an execution profiler to determine where the bottlenecks are in software. This is a perfectly routine practice in major software where speed is an issue. And iTunes is certainly in this category. Any idea that they seriously believe people will ditch their PCs and buy Macs just for the benefit of one badly-written program is utterly preposterous.

    The slowness of iTunes damages the reputation of Apple. Yet another reason for addressing it. Yet another reason to be puzzled as to why the problem is not addressed.

    Anyway, whatever the reason, clearly Apple has no intention of making the effort to write a native Windows version of iTunes that runs at normal speed. They have put out numerous iTunes revisions, each much the same as the last, no big improvement. Odd, considering that Safari competes reasonably with other browsers, where speed is a big factor in competing.

    Anyway, faced with Apple intransigence, which is an insult to the majority of iPod/Pad/etc owners, given that they run Windows PCs, and faced with the restrictiveness of the iTunes store, and the way Apple has treated developers, and the way it has treated iPhone 4 owners over the antenna issue, I have come to the conclusion that my original doubts about buying an iPod, my first ever piece of Apple technology, were well-founded, and I know that I will NEVER buy another Apple device of any kind or description.

    I used to have a Windows Mobile phone, and I found its non-phone features by far inferior to the Palm T3 that I used to have. Apps ran well on the T3. Equivalent apps for Windows Mobile 6 were so slow and required so many extra clicks that I gave up on them entirely. I eventually binned the phone and bought a Nokia, which is not perfect, but at least it works.

    My hope now is that Windows Phone 7 will be successful, given that it is a complete OS rewrite based on Zune technology, and that Microsoft will eat Apple’s lunch. I don’t know if I will be able to afford a WP7 phone, because I expect they will be expensive, and I don’t go in for contract deals. But if I ever do buy another phone, the first ones I will look at will be WP7.

    Whatever opinions other people have of Microsoft, all I can say is, Windows 7 is a great operating system because Microsoft actually listened to their customers after the Vista disaster. It’s about time Apple started listening to their customers too. Microsoft would never get away with the arrogance that Apple shows.

    • Daniel says:

      Actually Microsoft did get away with ignorance like apple has…. it was called windows vista, and more recently IE9 with its XP incompatibility, I think Google and Mozilla are laughing at Microsoft for it since more than 70% of computers use XP. So don’t say Microsoft isn’t ignorant, there just less ignorant, and only by a little.

  197. droid says:

    Just got a brand new 8 core g5 mac pro and though ‘Finally, iTunes will run properly now’.

    Its a slow as ever, still hangs. Maybe Apple should make an ‘iTunes light’. It really is a heap of shit in its current form – both on PC and Mac.

  198. Jake says:

    It’s because itunes “64 bit” is really 32. Run it in xpmode on windows 7, and its 10 times faster and never freezes.

  199. stian says:

    lol ive been waiting 8 minutes now for itunes to start up. my pc isnt that great but come on! seems like i cant put that album in my ipod before my bus leaves.. apple serously needs to fix ALOT of things if they want to keep their customers..

  200. Jimmy Love says:

    I found a great, easy way to speed up iTunes! I uninstalled it! and I’m returning the iPhone tonight!

  201. elmstreet says:

    The PC I’m running iTunes on is a Mac. Hate it hate it hate it. Itunes that is. I like my mac very much thank you, but itunes has become almost unusable. I have a new ipod that almost never gets synced because it is such a hassle. People who create these programs should remember:
    We aren’t all working on 21″ monitors.
    Some of us are sharing computers, or alternating between two machines, within the same household — don’t treat us like criminals when we want to use the calendar we created or song we downloaded from the other room. And don’t insult me by suggesting I spend $99 on a .mac membership.
    Some of us don’t have as much time as you to spend with our computers. Speediness really does count because I am leaving the house in 20 minutes and don’t have time to upgrade yet again, or wait much longer for these #&$*(#& graphics to load.

  202. DCSWin7U(ftw) says:

    Hey I run an ASUS UL-80VT. This thing came with 4GB of RAM, which is pretty spacious, has a 320GB HDD, and a DualP4 processor, with both onboard VGA graphics and a secondary nVidia G210m. Basically, this computer may not be the most media oriented laptop ever, but it is amazing when it comes to multitasking and running basic applications. (Mostly due to the RAM size and the fact that I overclocked both processors to 1.7 each. It runs like a beast after that.) My point is this: I got this computer, and it arrived with Windows 7 Home Premium. Eh. I put 30GB of music on it and switched over to iTunes. It took 10 seconds at best to load iTunes. I was kinda shocked, because I can simultaneously load up approximately 3 different web browsers with two tabs apiece before iTunes will load. Anyway, since I hadn’t been particularly impressed with Windows 7, I went ahead and changed it to a Hackintosh. Because of the dual VGA, it didnt run as well overall, but iTunes performance only increased moderately. Unfortunately, I just didnt enjoy Mac. I tasted the forbidden fruit, (for I have always used PCs for lack of any experience with any of the popular Mac OS’s), and it didnt work out. This computer ran the OS just fine. Not a big deal. But iTunes still sucked. Not to mention Ubuntu made it so that my Ethernet Adapter became ridiculously disfunctional and my two graphics cards conflicted too regularly. Anyway, I switched back over to Windows 7, and upgraded to Ultimate. I was impressed. The computer itself runs lightning fast. I picked up the PC iTunes again, and tried this one last time. iTunes still failed. easily ten seconds of lag. **UGH** Now for those of you naysayers out there, I am not an idiot. I have iTunes set to keep the files organized and to bring music files into the iTunes folder etc. The fact is, performance never changed. The application itself sucks. And I did check it out, iTunes is written very shabbily for such a smooth looking UI, and on ridiculously cheap software. In the end, I still use iTunes, just because I have always enjoyed the interface, but until iTunes gets a facelift, I have to agree with the general populace that WMP11 goes for the win. Not to mention, WMP11 runs beautifully on Windows 7 Ultimate. ‘Nuff said.

  203. Rachel says:

    I am experiencing the same exact problem (AS THE ORIGINAL POST) and just want to know what to do to fix things!!!

    Yes – I have a Dell – aka PC. So sue me.

    Have iTunes b/c I have an iPhone.

    Everything has worked fine for years – both on this Dell & my previous computer, an HP.

    Updated to on iTunes the other day & suddenly a good portion of my music library is gone & everything is working slow on iTunes – slow as in that akin to the days of dial-up Internet.

    I’m not a computer expert – I know how to operate a computer better than you’re average Joe, but am hopeless with this issue thus far.

    So please, someone please give me advice – without bitching about me needing to use a mac, etc., etc.

    THANK YOU!!!!!!

  204. Dave says:

    I have a mac and I’ve noticed that iTunes store has become progressively slower and slower and slower. Searching for a song, just loading it, clicking to sort music by popularity, changing so it just shows music or apps its frustratin. Its almost getting to the point where its going to be faster for me to drive downtown and buy a CD than to buy it from iTunes.

  205. Brad says:

    yep.. I read the same thing over and over… but no real solutions.

    I installed iTunes when I got my iPhone4. It installed, ran, then shit its pants for 2 days trying to do a gaplessplayback analysis… whatever the hell that is, and why cant I disable it…

    what the hell Apple ?

  206. Logan says:

    iTunes is the worst music storing Application I’ve ever used because every thing I have put in it through a disc that I own will not let me make a copy of it. iTunes acts as If it owns what ever you put in it. It will not let you copy your music out of it and make it a seperate file on your desk top.

  207. moi says:

    haha all these comments make me gloat, I thought I was standing all alone in this… but yeah fuck apple, the only thing so great about their products, is their design.

  208. makayla says:

    wow it works fine on my computer ….yhurs all suck xD

  209. The Old Wolf says:

    Here it is 2011, and the problem continues. iTunes bites the wax tadpole – People with iPods sorta put up with it but it still stinks like a cow barn.

  210. Killjoy says:

    I agree. It lags my computer so bad it won’t even close.

  211. Michael says:

    I just hate iTunes for being soooo sloooow..
    We pay alot of cash for iPods and Iphones (or at least I did) and in return Apple give us frustrating software… 🙁

  212. bobbie says:

    I agree with all the people who hate apple.

    I have owned maybe 10-12 macintosh computers in the old days ( the 90’s) when they were superior to anything, simply because there was no alternative ( DOS was not able to support any graphics program.
    But switched to real computers as soon as windows 95 / 98 matured.
    Never need anything apple anymore!!

    But last year I bought an Ipad and was forced to use Itunes. What a nightmare!

    This made me rethink my 20+ years of experience with apple computers and I can only come to the conclusion that this is a company that is totally unable to produce ANY professional software: in the beginning they survived thanks to Microsoft Word / Excel; they never made any real good software theselves: it is all this Kid stuff like software that you see on the basic Ipad. These programs like contacts and agenda etc; you cannot take this seriously!

    Apple is just a very snappy design / marketing / money machine, for the rest of us……

  213. Josh says:

    I agree with this:
    The software apple provides reminds me of the stuff you get when you buy a camera or a scanner.
    Sort of funny looking amateurish programs that can do hardly anything you expect and will never be maintained.
    2 years later you get a new version, as bad as the old one but with a new “look”.
    Just the looks, not the brains.
    Apple is just cosmetics.

  214. Kuba says:

    get sharepod bro its better and you can take music off of it too just google it its free

  215. Becks says:

    Glad it’s not just me! Got a new laptop a few months ago, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb HDD. It can run pretty much everything I need (PS, Chrome, Word, Acrobat, MPC, multiple Explorer windows) simultaneously with no lag. Open iTunes and the whole thing is fucked. Even after closing iTunes it’s still slightly laggy until the library file saves. Gah! I have an ancient iPod and iPhone, both of which I love but iTunes itself is a joke. They’re making so much friggen money off the peripherals you think the software that ties it together, though it’s free, could actually work.

  216. Chris says:

    the problem here is you people want some stupid media player to Organize all your dam music for some peice a shit flash drive that can do a little extra. YOU DONT NEED ITUNES OR WMP11 AND ALL THAT CRAP. DROP MUSIC INTO THE IPHONE/PAD LIKE WHAT IT IS A FUCKING FLASH DRIVE!

  217. Daniel says:

    The reason Itunes is suck a crappy program on windows is because the mac people don’t know how to program in DOS, I will say that Itunes doesn’t lag too horribly in XP, I’m on a 2.8 ghz pentium 4 with 2 gigs of ram and an nvidia geforce 6200 video card with 512mbs of ram, (I know I need to upgrade) and the reason that you guys are lagging so badly even on you’re god like machines is because the people at mac don’t care about vista or 7 compatibility, because over 70% of windows computers are still on XP, you guys probably won’t have any more problems in 4-5 years when people like me finally give up on XP. LOL

    • danny783 says:

      thats the craziest but maybe smartest post on this site…
      -ok so everybody has there opinion of better media players but, honestly is there a better device than the ipod?
      – something were u can install and run apps, rate music and easily create playlists that you can take and play anywhere, in the car, with your headphones etc….

  218. Clarke says:

    My iTunes was doing OK, not good but OK, in XP even with over 2500 albums. When I installed the last upgrade it took a shit and now there’s poop all thorough my system wherever iTunes is involved. I would try to scroll down the albums and there it sits. Once it starts to realize the command, it wakes up.

  219. JoeS says:

    This is the thing that’s driving me most to windows phone 7. Cannot wait to get rid of iTunes.

    • Mason says:

      This is why I dislike Apple, they have some of the best MP3/MP4 players out, period. However, they’re too strict on the software involved with said devices. Also, they overprice all of their products like crazy. I believe that it is iTunes, and Apple’s overpricing that is the cause of them being underdog to Microsoft.

  220. RandomS says:

    I like macs. Dont have one but iv tried it many times. Its very clean and polished. I also like linux. I use debian but used to use ubuntu. I like linux because it fufills all my geeky desires. Its also very cool. As for windows….. im not gonna dis it too much because i used it most my life til i found linux (but thats because i didnt know any better). I dont like itunes. I mean…. i like the interface and its polished look. but its very laggy. and it also doesnt run on linux. even on wine because usb doesnt work on wine. thats why i use it on vbox. its slow but it does the job. Off i go to see if itunes has unfrozen yet….

  221. Francis Foley says:

    itunes takes all day to install, over 20 minutes and its still not finished, ready to throw the PC out the window.

  222. tamer says:

    forget all these shit like itunes and wmp

    try virtual DJ

    you can dj or just play music
    and its focking fast ad you can mix 2 songs……
    more info @ http://www.virtualdj.com
    people who want to use it just for fun DO NOT BUY IT download the home version

    or you could try tractor but there is no free version of it

  223. Marian says:

    Ladies and Gentlemen; I am an almost 60 year old who works overseas in 4 countries and relies on iTunes to watch decent (British/American) television – I’m afraid my RAM lost most of his hard drive a few years ago and, do you know, I really do not care, but it really does drive me insane that I have to click on ‘store, check for downloads’ about 5 times before anything happens, and then the bloody thing insists on downloading all 414 things that I’ve had to buy in frickin’ HD, just to get the ordinary ‘D’ that I want to watch on my flaming computer, and which I do NOT WANT. Having learned some patience, I try REALLY HARD, not to ask the sodding store to check for downloads more than once, and just try really hard to wait for 45 minutes while it works itself out, but honestly, if any of you can come up with a solution for this utter bewilderment, I, for one, would be absolutely delighted.

  224. Neal says:

    Hell yea I know what you mean, I’m here sitting on a mac (not mine) and trying to get iTunes to just open the store and in the intervening time it took me to search and find this page and write a complaint, it’s still loading

  225. Brian says:

    My PC is a Core i7 running 16GB of ram, 120GB SSD (which runs iTunes) and a 2.5TB HDD that stores my music… I tunes still lags when selecting songs or scrolling upon first starting it up. GOTTA LOVE IT!

  226. Rob says:

    A 32 bit operating system will not use 4gb of RAM, 2.7gb is about it. Look in your search box for sysinfo and sysconfig and there you will see the bad news.

  227. Michael says:

    There is no way in hell im buying a mac just to run itunes smoothly. Apple should be ashamed of themselves for using a lowlife tactic just to try a desperate attempt to steal pc users by writing such a crappy itunes port for windows. They are the scum of the earth and Windows is FAR superior to any mac operating system. Windows has much better usability and compatibility because they are not trying to monopolise EVERY digidal medium. this is why i will always be a loyal windows user

  228. Bill says:

    WHY does it have to wipe an iPhone clean to do a software update? What’s THAT about? And SIX hours to sync? And only five “authorized” computers? If I pay $200 for an iPhone I ought to be able to sync it to my freakin’ toaster if I want. WTF

  229. Maria says:

    I found this post because I cannot keep itunes on my computer, and I don’t know why. It eats up an ENTIRE core of my 4-core processor… just to have ituns installed. I’m not even running the program! I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling the program several times. Same result: computer runs hot and SLOW. Is this typical, or is there something wrong?

  230. Krumblez says:

    Just reading this whilst syncing 795 .mp3s from my Vaio to iPad with iTunes, on track 52 lol

  231. […] Slowness. Thanks to its massive set of features, iTunes is jerky and inclined to lag. […]


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