It has to be said–Apple iTunes sucks. It’s freakishly slow on Windows. I don’t know what the problem is, but plugging in my iPhone into a USB 2.0 port to sync it causes the whole system to come to a drag. I’ve got 3 Gbs Seagate drives, 4 Gb of RAM, and I’m still running Windows XP so I can’t even blame Vista.

That leaves Apple holding all the blame. It’s not just syncing either. These are all slow:

• Importing new songs into my Library of 15K items (probably due to parsing, editing in place, and writing to disk a 10+ Mb XML file for each song) [who uses XML as a database...]
• Searching through my Library
• Playing any kind of high bitrate media or encoded video (I have an nVidia 8800 with 512 MB of RAM… it should be able to play a little 720p video smoothly)

Suspiciously, Mac users don’t complain iTunes is slow. Either Steve Jobs literally makes them duller so they tend not to notice the passage of time, or it’s just iTunes on Windows that sucks.

13 Responses to “Apple iTunes Sucks: Slow!”

1. Rob says:

   11/19/2008 at 6:48 am

   it just sucks on windows,

   Reply
2. eddie says:

   11/19/2008 at 1:04 pm

   they tunned MacOSX and now iTunes runs in a higher priority than the kernel (according to some Apple-crippled versions of dtrace). No way MS will hack Windows in that nasty ways for iTunes. But if you ask about WMPlayer instead, then …

   Reply
3. Christian van de Werken says:

   11/23/2008 at 10:53 pm

   I'm not sure about searching my library, or importing songs… those seem to run pretty smoothly on my box. I am completely, 100% in agreement with you on the sync though. It's always slow when I try to sync my iphone

   Reply
4. mgoode says:

   11/25/2008 at 4:31 pm

   I wonder if Krave owners have the same concern. I've been a fan of it ever since I started working with Motorola.It's got a 2 mega pixel camera, blue tooth and a full touch screen. I checked it out online at Motorola .com/krave. Definitely at the top of my holiday tech list.

   Reply
5. TestSEO says:

   12/15/2008 at 7:55 am

   just search on web..

   Reply
6. Matt says:

   12/19/2008 at 2:22 am

   This is sooooo true. This is the most clunky application ever. Certain menu's don't even work. It does all this **** I never want it to do, like “determining gapless playback”. Screw gapless playback! Leave the gaps in and give me back my computer's CPU! Apple gets a big fat “D” in my book for the quality of the programming behind iTunes. Oh, and how about you make us download the latest sucky version every two weeks. Give me a break.

   Reply
7. Jo R Hamburg says:

   2/9/2009 at 10:59 pm

   great article!, grats for u site

   Reply
8. curson says:

   3/11/2009 at 2:40 pm

   It’s slow as hell on Mac also, if you have a large library. It’s becoming impossible to work.

   Reply
9. Calculator Ftvb says:

   4/9/2009 at 10:47 am

   I use both the Mac and PC versions. When I use it with the Mac, there is very little performance hit. When I use it with the PC, Visual Studio 2003 takes ~15 minutes to launch (rather than ~10 seconds)

   Reply
10. Mac iTunes user says:

    7/25/2009 at 12:14 am

    I use iTunes on mac and have a large library – it is slow as a snail climbing Mt. Everest! Apple needs to fix the problem… I am even considering starting a dual boot so I can run Winamp instead.

    Reply
11. Ian says:

    9/12/2009 at 11:41 am

    Runs fine on my Mac. And I have an 81.96G library =/

    Reply
12. calvin says:

    9/14/2009 at 6:30 pm

    since updating to itunes 9 its slow to load my tracks, never was before even with a 330gb library! apple need to fix this problem quickly

    Reply
13. Scott says:

    11/1/2009 at 7:39 am

    I use mac. I can easily say iTunes is terrible on mac as well.

    Reply