Hello,
I recently downloaded the updated version of iTunes from Apple (v.7) on my iBook. I was shocked to see that while listening to MP3 or AAC files that my CPU usage was in the upper 90's! I went into iTunes and it was doing some sort of stop-gap length determination, so I killed it, and my CPU usage went back down to about 50% or so, but in activity monitor, I find that iTunes sucks up about 40% of my available CPU cycles. The previous versions didn't take up more than 10-15% at most. This is bothering me because my battery life has dropped from about 6-7 hours, to 3-4 hours.
I've gone through all the options in iTunes, but I may have missed something. Anyone have any experience with this? Or will I have to go back to v.6 or earlier to go easier on my CPU?
For reference, I'm running a mid-2005 14" iBook with a 1.33Ghz G4, 768MB RAM, 60GB HDD, OS X 10.4.7.
Cheers,
The Czar
When my new install of iTunes 7 was doing the "gapless playback" check, it was using 40%-50% percent of CPU, but now that all that's done, It's only using about 10%-12% for music playback...
PowerBook G4, 1.5 Ghz, 1GB RAM
I just installed iTunes 7 onto my OS 10.3.9 Powermac and I'm curious to know what you two are talking about. What's the gapless playback check? Is this something that starts automatically? With only Mp3's and AAC? I just played some Mp3's and didn't see iTunes doing anything different. Is it just a laptop or Tiger thing? Do you have recommendations to everyone after installing iTunes 7?
May just be a Tiger thing... don't know for sure, though.
I have the same problem. It bogs down my G4 450 like i was using photoshop illustrator and indesign all at once.
The processor usage is probably related to the new version of iTunes supporting automatic gapless playback detection. It looks through your music files and analyzes them to determine if they are live albums or others that should not have the ~2 second gap between tracks. This consumes a good amount of processing, but is largely a one time occurance.
I installed OS 10.3 on a Beige G3 (w/XLR8 350mhz G4) via XPF, upgraded to 10.3.9, and now I have a problem with the iTunes gapless thing. My main boot drive is on a PCI fast SCSI bus. My iTunes music folder is on another drive on the onboard ATA bus and songs are saved there because there's space there. That music folder is a collection from another of my computers which I added to the Beige's iTunes library. Every time I open iTunes it starts doing the gapless search thing and about a quarter of the way through stalls and iTunes is stuck, so it's still not ever once finished doing the search. I can't even get the force quit command on the keyboard after it stalls. I force quit by clicking and holding on the iTunes icon in the dock. So when I open iTunes I first click on the little x to stop the gapless thing. Whenever I import music, when it's finished importing, the gapless search thing automatically starts up again. It's a bit annoying. Any suggestions? I'm thinking maybe the cross bus is the problem, but I don't have another SCSI drive large enough. I'm hoping there's just a simple way to disable the automatic search.
what if, what if you add the music 1/4 at a time to your library from scratch if possible. maybe not having such a high load will help, who knows. or maybe a re install of itunes?
Thanks for the suggestion. I gave it a try by renaming the iTunes Music folder to something else and then creating a new folder on the same hard drive called iTunes Music. I moved a few of the music files from the old folder over to the new iTunes Music folder, then opened iTunes and it started doing the gapless thing, but it was finding all the music files, not just the ones in the new iTunes Music folder, and running the search just like before and stalling on a file that wasn't in the new folder, so I wonder what the gapless thing is actually doing. It doesn't seem bound to the designated iTunes Music folder.
Anyway, I solved the problem by copying all the iTunes application files and folders (preferences, playlists, etc.) from the other Mac computer from which I pulled my large music collection onto a CD and then took the CD over to the Beige G3 and simply used those copied files to replace the files on the Beige G3 system. I then ran a permissions repair in Disk utility and then opened iTunes. The gapless thing did not start. I immediately went to the iTunes preferences>Advanced and designated my iTunes Music folder on the ATA hard drive. When I closed the preferences, a box appeared and asked me if I wanted to copy and organize the files in my newly designated folder according to the "keep iTunes organized" preference. I clicked yes and it ran an organization and everything works great. No gapless searching. That was already performed earlier on the other computer, so I guess it's recorded in one of those old application files I copied to the Beige.
**But if anyone knows how to disable the gapless search, it'd still be good to describe it here in case someone else with a similar problem comes upon this thread.