iTunes Smart Playlists can cause slow app loading

Jul 07, '04 09:15:00AM

Contributed by: tsugaru

I recently reinstalled Panther on my shiny new 300GB hard drive. iTunes used to load all my songs (about 1,700 total) with one bounce. Soon after, it would take about seven to eight bounces to launch, with nothing else going on in the system.

After some experimenting, I figured out that it was caused by smart playlists. I had one for each of my soundtracks and albums (about 38), and two for my MP3s and AAC files. I turned these into regular playlists (I guess I will manually update the AAC/MP3 ones later on). After doing this for all my smart playlists, my iTunes returned to launching after one bounce.

I guess the Smart Playlists search your library on startup of iTunes and add the necessary files to them. So if you're like me and are really peeved about iTunes sudden lackluster performance, turn your smart playlists into regular ones for a speed bump.

I just hope that with this enhancement going on system-wide in Tiger that Apple revamps this so all our apps don't go boat slow.

[robg adds: I haven't noticed this problem, primarily because I use very few smart playlists, and I also tend to just leave iTunes running all the time. It only gets relaunched if I have to reboot for some reason.]

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