Speed up iTunes format conversions in large collections

Feb 23, '09 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: tempel

I had to convert about 20,000 songs to AAC format. When I tried to do this in iTunes, this operation took forever -- the more songs it had converted, the slower it got, and it was already down to three to four seconds per song, although a single conversion would have taken a fraction of a second.

The reason for the slowness appears to be that, after each change, the iTunes User Interface wants to get updated, which takes its time for such a large library.

But then I found a workaround: If you open the Preferences dialog, and keep it open, the conversion goes fast, without the slowdown due to the library size.

[robg adds: Occasional macosxhints.com editor Kirk McElhearn tested this for me on his large library, and found that this trick does, in fact, appear to work as described. He also told me he usually uses X Lossless Decoder when he needs to do a large number of file conversions, instead of doing them in iTunes.]

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