Hey iTunes 10, thanks for using 20% of my CPU even when *not playing anything*.

13 years ago

Well done, well done.

<

Tags: ,

43 Responses:

  1. saltdawg says:
    13 years ago at 2:25 am

    Roger that.
  2. substitute says:
    13 years ago at 2:41 am

    Also great: when iTunes takes The Thread and won't give it back, and every goddam thing in the OS blocks.
  3. pete23 says:
    13 years ago at 2:56 am

    Hmmm. Mine is pegged at an altogether more sensible 0.1%. Must make sure I don't switch on any options. Or indeed touch it in any way...
  4. rane500 says:
    13 years ago at 3:07 am

    Mine sits at .1% as well, but I'm still more impressed Apple managed an update where every single UI change in the program made it uglier - and violated their own guidelines to boot.
  5. john_x says:
    13 years ago at 3:24 am

    As a bonus it no longer works with the DAAP server I use (Firefly Media Server). No idea whether the fault is technically with iTunes 10 or not, but Firefly worked with previous versions of iTunes just fine. Sooo, I'm back to iTunes 9.2.1 for now so I can actually use it to listen to music (which is all on my server). Yay, iTunes!
    • jkow says:
      13 years ago at 5:37 am

      I read that there are updates for firefly available which fix the problem. It seems firefly (and some other media servers) didn't stick to the daap protocol as intended (by apple?), by not filling in the content type for mp3s. Older versions of iTunes tolerate that, the new one doesn't.
      • hattifattener says:
        13 years ago at 10:39 am

        Last I checked, DAAP was a secret, proprietary protocol which Apple changes from time to suit themselves. It's not like there's a published spec to which Firefly could be not conforming to.
        • jkow says:
          13 years ago at 12:39 pm

          True, probably. This time, though, it seams, the protocol hasn't been changed, just the new iTunes behaves a little stricter. Anyways, the point is, a fix is supposedly available.
  6. jkonrath says:
    13 years ago at 8:24 am

    I'm at .1% and 20 threads too. Is this the initial, "ooh, I need to do yet another meaningless 'rebuild your library for this version of iTunes'" pass? Or did you sign up for Ping?
    • jwz says:
      13 years ago at 11:50 am

      I did sign up for Ping, but I appear to be signed out, and even after disabling the iTunes Store in preferences and re-launching it's still using 20% CPU.
  7. cow says:
    13 years ago at 8:25 am

    It's ugly and it's bloated. Ugh. Every iTunes release makes me sadder.

    That said: every media program out there sucks. Is there anything that is good sucks less? I'm ready to consider switching at this point.
    • vanbeast says:
      13 years ago at 11:09 am

      CDs in a massive changer?

      :'(
    • mcity says:
      13 years ago at 11:25 am

      VLC?
      • greatevil says:
        13 years ago at 11:43 am

        Sadly iTunes has best solved the "I have >300 gb of music" issue. Plenty of things play music just fine, few of them deal with a library well at all.
        • jered says:
          13 years ago at 12:09 pm

          The only alternative I've found is MediaMonkey, but it's Windows only and buggy as hell. iTunes has pretty much destroyed the market for 3rd party music management because 95% of music players are iDevices, and Apple makes it very hard to support iDevices from other software.

          Wade at Xconomy did an article on iTunes bloat the other day, which attracted the dregs of the internet commenters.

          The most interesting theory from there was that part of the reason iTunes is a monolith of suck instead of a collection of web-based services with a thin syncing client is because Apple's original contract with the music industry included that they would never put their music "on the web". That would certainly explain a lot if true.
      • jwz says:
        13 years ago at 11:45 am

        VLC is awesome for when you want to use your Mac to re-experience what UI design was like on Linux in 1995.

        Needs more dotfiles, though.
        • cow says:
          13 years ago at 1:05 pm

          Yeah, pretty much. Or there's Amarok -- but if I wanted something that burns through my CPU, crashes randomly, and is ugly as sin, well, I already use iTunes, so I'm good.
        • cfd_samurai says:
          13 years ago at 2:22 pm

          True, though it at least plays just about everything (w/o DRM) w/o having to hunt down the fucking codecs. I couldn't believe after switching to Mac that I had to go hunt codecs on Apple's site just to get it to play .avi files.
          • jwz says:
            13 years ago at 5:42 pm

            You only have to install one thing, Perian, and then Quicktime Player plays absolutely everything.
            • cfd_samurai says:
              13 years ago at 6:48 pm

              Yeah, I figured that out after swearing into Twitter/FB/LJ about it. One of my friends linked to the same thing. Thanks for the heads up. :)

              Now only if Apple, the supporters of the creative types on the interwebs, had made it that way from the beginning....
            • wikkit42 says:
              13 years ago at 11:16 pm

              Thanks. I don't know if it's going to work, but if it means one less mpg that Quicktime won't play that VLC will, win.
        • remonstrare says:
          13 years ago at 5:23 pm

          VLC devs agree, a proper Mac UI is in the works, you simply have to do nothing and wait for them to finish it. Or you could help.

          In the meantime, VLC is awesome, unless you think that needing a separate viewer program for each proprietary media format, and only being able to play one region's worth of DVDs, is a good thing.
          • jwz says:
            13 years ago at 5:46 pm

            After installing Perian, Quicktime Player plays absolutely everything. No need to subject yourself to the VLC GUI of Pure Pain. Why the fuck would someone bother writing a brand new player UI instead of doing what the Perian folks quite sensibly did and just packaging up the various codecs into Quicktime components? The Quicktime Player GUI is just fine, and by "just fine" I mean that in comparison to VLC (or in fact any Linux-originated GUI) it's like a thousand years of continuous blowjobs.

            No, I don't choose to "help" this idiotic and misguided project. Thanks for the helpful suggestion though!

            I never play physical DVDs on my computer, let alone out-of-region ones, so I don't give a shit about that.
            • ritcey says:
              13 years ago at 12:06 pm

              "...it's like a thousand years of continuous blowjobs."

              /* slow clap */

              now _there's_ a catchy turn of phrase. Well done, sir.
        • anktastic says:
          13 years ago at 6:53 am

          Hey, don't worry... if the iTunes 10 UI changes are any indication of future direction, in a few releases iTunes will look worse than VLC.
    • ink_13 says:
      13 years ago at 1:33 pm

      Maybe take Clementine for a spin? What became Clementine (Amarok 1.4) was once my music player of choice, and it's only been more de-weirded since then.

      Some people really like Songbird. I'm not one of them, but you might be.
      • cow says:
        13 years ago at 7:44 pm

        Hm. Didn't try Songbird; anything that has about fifty of those little social networking items in the "why you should use our software" page explains to me why I shouldn't.

        But Clementine works! Thank you. There's a bunch of little UI things that bug me, but overall it is getting the job done. I'll play with it more.
    • secondtino says:
      13 years ago at 1:42 pm

      I've hated the fuck out of iTunes for Windows ever since its maiden release. It was slow, took FOREVER to import an album-sized folder (14 tracks) of mp3s... so I went looking around.

      JRiver MediaCenter fits the bill nicely. It's fast as hell, doesn't have any issues with my 60,000+ song library -- had a lot of nice bells and whistles, mostly multi-zone playing, so I can have one sound card feeding my patio speakers and another playing different music in my dining room.

      It will also index photos and video if thats your thing. (I don't really use it for that.)

      There's a built in TiVO server so I can stream pictures and music to my TiVOs, built in DLNA support so it streams music and photos to my PS3' it syncs my iPod, has support for a bunch of on-line music stores (Amazon, AmazonMP3, CD Baby, etc.), podcast management.

      It will play just about any format you can throw at it -- MP3, OGG, FLAC -- and will transcode it on the fly if you need it to; or you can do batch encoding. It will also playback protected M4a provided it has access to iTunes on the same machine. (It needs to use the iTunes API to authenticate to the store to play the DRM'd content... been using Noteburn to eliminate the DRM'd stuff from my library...)

      I do find it crashes on occasion -- usually when I'm controlling via the web interface and it hits a m4a, but I assume it's because iTunes is horribly out of date on the machine at this point.

      There's also a third-party tool, RiverMote, which is an iPhone/iTouch app which gives you native remote control, much like the iTunes Remote does.
      • cow says:
        13 years ago at 7:45 pm

        So it's ultra-bloatware that crashes randomly and is Windows-only? Where do I sign up?
        • secondtino says:
          13 years ago at 7:53 pm

          Actually, I think I said exactly when it crashes -- playing DRM'd tunes from the iTunes store; and I said what the fix was (keep updating iTunes) or what my fix was (remove DRM'd tracks from my library). So it's neither random nor undocumented.

          In terms of it being Windows based, I can't be bothered with the de rigeur snobbery.

          And bloatware is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

          Bottom line, it works for me a million times better than iTunes and I am happy with it.
    • rodgerd says:
      13 years ago at 1:19 am

      I like Ampache streaming to devices around the house. Your mileage may vary.
    • lionsphil says:
      13 years ago at 9:38 am

      I can rule out foobar2000. All other UI hate and stuttery playback of certain codecs aside, it actual outdid the usual fatal failing I've found with media libraries such as Windows Media Player (a complete disregard for disc numbers when sorting by album or track, so you end up getting track 1 of disc 1 followed by track 1 of disc 2). It picks up on subtrack markers in MP3 files...and then plays them out of order.

      Currently, the best media library I've found is the filesystem. :/
  8. mcity says:
    13 years ago at 11:24 am

    Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Apple Inc.!
  9. taffer says:
    13 years ago at 6:18 am

    I love the way iTunes shows me that lovely spinning Gay Pride beachball pretty much any time I do anything (expand a Podcast listing, click something, etc.).

    Sure, my library is on a network drive (nobody's invented 9mm tall 1TB drives for laptops yet, have they?) but it's connected via AFP and the server really isn't loaded at all.

    Watching my network action, iTunes sure does load reading and writing entire song files constantly. Don't MP3 and MP4s let you update tag info in-place?
  10. fantasygoat says:
    13 years ago at 12:17 pm

    What I find impressive is that my new i5 with 8GB of memory MacBook Pro can't even keep up with running Time Machine without going into fan overdrive.

    Seriously? This is the future?
    • freontrip says:
      13 years ago at 2:01 pm

      Sure. I mean, just because an old Pentium with 32 MB RAM managed remote backups without any difficulty running Slackware 3 when I was in high school doesn't mean we should have any expectation of useful efficiency from hardware (and software) for which we paid a hefty premium.

Comments are closed because this post is 13 years old.