Large Library Problems With iTunes

[sallenmd]

Is anyone here using iTunes successfully with a very large collection of music? I'm not referring to how many GB of music, because that obviously varies widely based on the bit rate you prefer. Rather, I am referring to the number of tracks.

I have about 175,000 tracks. Please do not offer any comments about nobody needing that much music or similar criticisms. I'm looking for sincere help. I have my reasons for having a lot of music. I'm over 50 and have been collecting music of every genre for 40 years. Now that I've ripped it all, I experience serious slowness of performance when editing tracks or scrolling.

Any operation that affects the the iTunes Library file will obviously be slow because that many tracks has made that file huge. I can marginally tolerate this issue, but another that I attribute to the size of my library file has become unbearable: I often get an error saying "The iTunes Library file could not be saved. An unknown error has occurred. (-50)" It often occurs when I am adding tracks via the iTunes Store or Amazon and makes it so the files I just downloaded are not in my library. Does anyone have any experience with this error? Any suggestions?

I am seriously thinking of switching to MediaMonkey because they claim to not choke on large libraries like iTunes does. I hesitate because I don't want to have to re-create my SmartPlaylists, I like compressing lossless files to 128 KB on my iPod during sync to travel with a large variety of music, and I listen to a lot of Audible books not supported by MM.

Thank you in advance for any input.

[AlanJhn1]

Hi, I know it's late in coming, so you may not need this anymore. I also have a large library, about 125,000 songs. The (PC) computer was unbearably sloooow, and would crash regularly, when using iTunes. Just to change the year on an album, sometimes would take 1-2 minutes to apply. To scroll from top to bottom of songs, would take about 3-4 minutes, and would regularly lock up, or crash. I tried everything, adding memory, larger HD etc, which showed minimal, if any improvement. I finally broke down about 3 weeks ago (Black Friday sale) and bought a new computer. The funny thing is, I bought a middle of the road computer (<$500 on sale), no speed demon, and now it blazes through everything. I can scroll from top to bottom of my songs, as fast as I can move the scroll bar, importing CDs is about 1/2 the time, and changing basic fields like the year of an album, is a couple seconds. It was the best $500 I ever spent.

Hope this helps somewhat

[sallenmd]

Thanks for the input AlanJhn1. I too suffered those indignities. Even on a brand-new super fast computer. I have reached the conclusion that iTunes is a steaming pile of dung. I got MediaMonkey and it is better in almost every way. Much faster and much better engineered for good performance. iTunes speed problem is because Apples' software developers are too stupid to find a way to cache changes and not have to save the entire .itl file every time you make the tiniest change to one file tag. I now use iTunes only to buy from the store and to manage the Apps on my iPad.

Any music I buy I let MediaMonkey manage. It is so much Smarter than iTunes. It automatically monitors my music folders and adds or changes as necessary with each startup. That means that when I buy new music from the iTunes store, MediaMonkey always finds it. iTunes can't do that. I have to manually build new Smart Playlists, and some aspects of MediaMonkey are less intuitive than iTunes, but it's worth it for software that actually works.

[dyrcm]

I was wondering if sallenmd found a solution to the problem without changing products. I also have over 175,000 songs and it is painful to deal with.