Aqua Taskforce

MicrowaveDave wrote on December 7, 2008, 9:25pm

You might want to try going back to iTunes 5. It is soooo much faster than the new versions of iTunes and has heaps of features that have been removed from later versions and suffers from almost none of the bugs you mention. It works far better with my iPod Shuffle than iTunes 7 or 8 because I can keep the shuffle in the source list at all times, allows me to uncheck a song from only one playlist, allows me to open two playlists in separate windows so I can drag songs between playlists easily (which was also removed in a later version) and also has that cool 'radiation' CD burning icon rather than plain old boring text. It's possible that some more recent iPods require iTunes 7 or 8 so maybe it's not an option for you, but worth a try.

I'm a big fan of 'if it ain't broken, don't fix it' so tend to stick with old versions until the new version offers improved functionality. When a new version actually REMOVES functionality, I find it difficult not to laugh at all the people who 'upgrade' for no reason then complain about it. But unfortunately nowadays many people are forced to update due to new hardware purchases or their company buying them new hardware, so it's not very funny for these people, I feel bad for them. If the new version is missing functionality Apple should fix it, but they are squarely aimed at market share at the moment, not pleasing their existing users. I fear it'll all go pear-shaped when they bloat it so much it becomes another Windows Vista. My music library with iTunes 5 opens almost instantly on a 233MHz iMac and is very fast and responsive, but iTunes 8 takes about 45 seconds to open it on a 2 year old MacBook and feels very sluggish.

jasper wrote on December 17, 2008, 1:37pm

MicroWaveDave: you are a blast from the past.


Every time.

iTunes performance should improve, though, but I don't want to give my Genious away just yet!

kelchm wrote on February 22, 2009, 7:32pm

I think its pretty clear iTunes needs a complete rewrite.

linuxforever wrote on May 25, 2009, 9:39pm

In my experience (Windows 2000, iTunes v5, some AMD 900MHz) the CPU load always rises from a few per cent to the full 100 per cent when viewing the active downloads! When viewing something else (music playlist, iTunes store etc.) it dropps again. I do not have the slightest idea what sort of strange programming mistake is causing this unintuitive behaviour (I mean, I could imagine, but how can you not reconize that, Apple Devs, please??)
So I agree with you, kelchm: Rewriting the app in Cocoa is the only sensible way of getting rid of all the performance issues most iTunes versions obviously seem to suffer from!