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iTunes 12.6.1 has become beachball city. And I can't delete some podcasts.


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A few updates ago, sometime in the last year, iTunes suddenly became very slow when changing views (album - artist - recently added) or to switch from mode to mode (music - podcasts - apps.) I'll often have to wait for minutes for the beachball to go away. It does get there eventually, every time. 

 

I just discovered another problem. I tried to delete some old unheard podcasts, and found that I couldn't delete some. iTunes cranks away using all the CPU it can get, for a long time, but does not delete these problem podcasts. 

 

I am running the latest iTunes 12.6.1, on a late 2012 Mac Mini running Sierra 10.12.5,  16 GB RAM.

 

My iTunes library is pretty massive, upwards of 84,000 music tracks, and tons of audio podcasts. 

 

What can I do about this, the perma-podcasts, and the sluggish performance?

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20 minutes ago, Kenji said:

A few updates ago, sometime in the last year, iTunes suddenly became very slow when changing views (album - artist - recently added) or to switch from mode to mode (music - podcasts - apps.) I'll often have to wait for minutes for the beachball to go away. It does get there eventually, every time. 

 

I just discovered another problem. I tried to delete some old unheard podcasts, and found that I couldn't delete some. iTunes cranks away using all the CPU it can get, for a long time, but does not delete these problem podcasts. 

 

I am running the latest iTunes 12.6.1, on a late 2012 Mac Mini running Sierra 10.12.5,  16 GB RAM.

 

My iTunes library is pretty massive, upwards of 84,000 music tracks, and tons of audio podcasts. 

 

What can I do about this, the perma-podcasts, and the sluggish performance?

 

I suggest you split the library, perhaps into one for music and another for podcasts?

 

I have 9 iTunes libraries, one for each genre: one for Classical, Romantic and Modern, another for Early, Renaissance and Barroque, another for Opera, another for Jazz, etc.

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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Do you have many smart playlists that are set to update automatically?

 

I had a similar issue with beachballs after nearly every action. I removed about a hundred auto-updating smart playlists that I no longer used (many of which returned tens of thousands of tracks) and the beachballs went away across the board.

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Nope, not many smart playlists.

 

But guess what? My problem is solved!

 

Looking for similar topics, I came across one that was talking about podcasts viewed as list vs. classic list. I have always been on classic list. As soon as I tried changing from classic list to list, I was suddenly able to delete the podcasts that wouldn't delete. And as soon as those podcasts were gone, so is the beachball. Switching from module to module and view to view is once again happening almost instantaneously.

 

Go figure.

 

Thanks for the help!

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9 hours ago, semente said:

 

I suggest you split the library, perhaps into one for music and another for podcasts?

 

I have 9 iTunes libraries, one for each genre: one for Classical, Romantic and Modern, another for Early, Renaissance and Barroque, another for Opera, another for Jazz, etc.

 

Wow,, there's literally no reason to do that unless you have like a million tracks in your library. 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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10 hours ago, Kenji said:

A few updates ago, sometime in the last year, iTunes suddenly became very slow when changing views (album - artist - recently added) or to switch from mode to mode (music - podcasts - apps.) I'll often have to wait for minutes for the beachball to go away. It does get there eventually, every time. 

 

I just discovered another problem. I tried to delete some old unheard podcasts, and found that I couldn't delete some. iTunes cranks away using all the CPU it can get, for a long time, but does not delete these problem podcasts. 

 

I am running the latest iTunes 12.6.1, on a late 2012 Mac Mini running Sierra 10.12.5,  16 GB RAM.

 

My iTunes library is pretty massive, upwards of 84,000 music tracks, and tons of audio podcasts. 

 

What can I do about this, the perma-podcasts, and the sluggish performance?

 

84K isn't that big. This sort of thing is hard to troubleshoot, though. 

 

First, do you have a lot of smart playlists? If so, that can slow things down a lot. 

 

Second, where are the iTunes files? On an internal drive, SSD or HD, or on an external? If the latter, how is it connected to your computer? If it's on a Mac mini, it's got a very slow HD inside. 

 

You see that the CPU activity is high? Are there any other processes that are high as well when this happens?

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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6 hours ago, Kenji said:

Nope, not many smart playlists.

 

But guess what? My problem is solved!

 

Looking for similar topics, I came across one that was talking about podcasts viewed as list vs. classic list. I have always been on classic list. As soon as I tried changing from classic list to list, I was suddenly able to delete the podcasts that wouldn't delete. And as soon as those podcasts were gone, so is the beachball. Switching from module to module and view to view is once again happening almost instantaneously.

 

Go figure.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Huh, that's odd... 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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4 hours ago, kirkmc said:

 

Wow,, there's literally no reason to do that unless you have like a million tracks in your library. 

 

I don't like to browse for classical music in a mixed pool that also contains rock, jazz or soundtracks.

 

P.S But I must add that I don't use any portable music device so all my files are neatly stored in a NAS.

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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9 minutes ago, semente said:

 

I don't like to browse for classical music in a mixed pool that also contains rock, jazz or soundtracks.

 

P.S But I must add that I don't use any portable music device so all my files are neatly stored in a NAS.

 

How hard is it? I have my music with custom genres, so I can use the column browser to only look at a specific genre when I want. It just seems like a recipe for problems to have so many libraries. 

I write about Macs, music, and more at Kirkville.

Author of Take Control of macOS Media Apps

Co-host of The Next Track podcast.

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1 hour ago, kirkmc said:

 

How hard is it? I have my music with custom genres, so I can use the column browser to only look at a specific genre when I want. It just seems like a recipe for problems to have so many libraries. 

 

No. It works beautifully.

Even with a single-genre library I am already using up all the columns in the browser.

I listen mostly to classical music and tag all my files manually.

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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I have two smart playlists defined:

 

"Classical"

 

"Nonclassical"  (which is everything else)

 

Then I can do anything from within one of those, emulating two separate libraries, but with the advantage that both are available simultaneously.

 

I do the same in Audirvana

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If you have a good back up, I would suggest doing a clean install.  It's been my experience that just doing update after update after update eventually leads to problems.

 

I am running 10.12.6 on a 2011 i5 Mac mini, with tons of movies, podcasts, music, etc... on externals with out a single problem.

No electron left behind.

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If you have a backup, we should be safe :)

 

Then, trash the following file:

 

users > *you* > Music > iTunes > iTunes Library.itl

 

Now open iTunes, and it should be empty. Drag and drop the original Music folder into the iTunes window, and it should start re-indexing. The default music folder is here:

 

users > *you* > Music > iTunes > iTunes Media > Music

 

You'll have to drag in the Movies folder too... but the files will not be copied, just indexed.

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