Worlds Largest iTunes Library

[willfriedwald]

I also have a 2TB all filled with music, but tell me this - you can't possibly have it all in one iTunes library, can you? I don't see how that's possible... iT just can't handle that much, even with the fastest hardware that's out there...

 

W

 

[djweasel1980]

My suggestion would be to use winamp. I Currently have

448,183 songs loaded into the library. After about 440,000 the program may crash once in a while (only when adding more media).

I simply restart winamp and then add more music to it. Has been working fine for me for years.

 

[bernardl]

Hum... impressive, but navigation becomes a nightmare unless you have an excellent memory.

 

I must be around 650GB spread over 1.000 - 1.100 CDs, 700+ artists, 220+ of them being high res (24 bits at various sampling rates).

 

I am now trying to avoid buying from too many new artists and instead explore other pieces from the 700 first ones.

 

Cheers,

Bernard

 

 

[LooneyTunes]

hey guys I saw this article before joining the site and I am wondering on any updates of your collections or any new records?

 

[LooneyTunes]

???

 

[Eyeman]

Any updates on this? Mine is just under 3Tb . Performance is marginal in Itunes, but I don't have a choice.

 

Chris

[mwheelerk]

Any updates on this? Mine is just under 3Tb . Performance is marginal in Itunes, but I don't have a choice.

 

Chris

When you say you don't have a choice why is that? What about JRiver?

[Geoffrey Armstrong]

When you say you don't have a choice why is that? What about JRiver?

 

J River allows you to have different views of your one "main" library.

 

You can create these views as you would seperate libraries in iTunes, except you don't need to quit and relaunch the program with the opt/alt key held down to pick a different library.

 

Also a "view" in J River can be determined from characters contained in the filename(path). That way you can avoid trying to play music from a drive that may currently not be present.

[Eyeman]

J River allows you to have different views of your one "main" library.

 

You can create these views as you would seperate libraries in iTunes, except you don't need to quit and relaunch the program with the opt/alt key held down to pick a different library.

 

Also a "view" in J River can be determined from characters contained in the filename(path). That way you can avoid trying to play music from a drive that may currently not be present.

 

replying to both of you on Jriver. I took your advice and bought it. The majority of my 3tb are movies (mp4 Itunes). It doesn't seem to manage those, am I right?

 

chris

[Daudio]

Mine is just under 3Tb . Performance is marginal in Itunes

 

Chris,

 

My library has grown to 825 GB, and the larger it grew the more the performance of my iTunes (9) interface slowed down until it was almost unusable

 

My library, while smaller then yours, was perhaps more complicated, with many hierarchical playlist folders and playlists for each artist, composer, and various special categories, and quite a few 'cross posts' of the same tracks.

 

I believe the performance problem was in the amount of memory available to process the iTunes database (.itdb, a SQLite database - now 5.8 MB). I was running on an old G4 Mac tower which was limited to 1.5 GB of RAM. I have just recently switched over to a 2010 Mac Mini with 8 GB of RAM and iTunes interface performance is now fine - no problems, even with other programs running !

 

So try to increase the amount of memory available to your iTunes library to see if that fixes your performance problems.

 

You should certainly try out JRiver, but be warned that there is a steep learning curve to be able to control it well, and you already know how to get what you want from iTunes...

[Eyeman]

Chris,

 

My library has grown to 825 GB, and the larger it grew the more the performance of my iTunes (9) interface slowed down until it was almost unusable

 

My library, while smaller then yours, was perhaps more complicated, with many hierarchical playlist folders and playlists for each artist, composer, and various special categories, and quite a few 'cross posts' of the same tracks.

 

I believe the performance problem was in the amount of memory available to process the iTunes database (.itdb, a SQLite database - now 5.8 MB). I was running on an old G4 Mac tower which was limited to 1.5 GB of RAM. I have just recently switched over to a 2010 Mac Mini with 8 GB of RAM and iTunes interface performance is now fine - no problems, even with other programs running !

 

So try to increase the amount of memory available to your iTunes library to see if that fixes your performance problems.

 

You should certainly try out JRiver, but be warned that there is a steep learning curve to be able to control it well, and you already know how to get what you want from iTunes...

 

You aren't kidding on Jriver, I consider myself fairly sharp, but I can't play a movie.

 

my hardware, I think I'm good. I have a 2014 Mac Pro with a 12 Core 2.7 with 30mb of L3, 1Tb of internal flash, 2 Dual Promise Thunderbolt 2 32Tb drive arrays. I don't think I could possibly throw any more hardware at it.

[jhwalker]

Chris,

 

My library has grown to 825 GB, and the larger it grew the more the performance of my iTunes (9) interface slowed down until it was almost unusable

 

My library, while smaller then yours, was perhaps more complicated, with many hierarchical playlist folders and playlists for each artist, composer, and various special categories, and quite a few 'cross posts' of the same tracks.

 

I believe the performance problem was in the amount of memory available to process the iTunes database (.itdb, a SQLite database - now 5.8 MB). I was running on an old G4 Mac tower which was limited to 1.5 GB of RAM. I have just recently switched over to a 2010 Mac Mini with 8 GB of RAM and iTunes interface performance is now fine - no problems, even with other programs running !

 

So try to increase the amount of memory available to your iTunes library to see if that fixes your performance problems.

 

You should certainly try out JRiver, but be warned that there is a steep learning curve to be able to control it well, and you already know how to get what you want from iTunes...

 

70k tracks here = 1.3TB, there's a lot of low-res stuff purchased from iTunes or Amazon before my current commitment to lossless

 

No performance issues - 2010 Mac Mini, 2.5 GHz i5, 8GB RAM.

[Daudio]

I have a 2014 Mac Pro with a 12 Core 2.7 with 30mb of L3, 1Tb of internal flash, 2 Dual Promise Thunderbolt 2 32Tb drive arrays. I don't think I could possibly throw any more hardware at it.

 

I don't see how much RAM you have from that spec ? Not that it should be anywhere as limited as I used to be

 

So what kind of performance issues are you experiencing ? Perhaps there are other problems that may, or may not have solutions.

[Eyeman]

I don't see how much RAM you have from that spec ? Not that it should be anywhere as limited as I used to be

 

So what kind of performance issues are you experiencing ? Perhaps there are other problems that may, or may not have solutions.

 

Hi, sorry, 64GB of RAM in the system. After two days of dorking with Jriver, it doesn't support video playback for Macs in MC19. I'm sure it's awesome for you audio gurus, but it's not doing much for us movie addicts. I'm hoping MC20 will fix this or I paid a $50 DA tax

 

the performance issues I cite are Itunes. It's search features are very basic, no organizational features, etc. I have about 3TB like I said. I am working on ripping about 600 DVDs which will double the size and the issues, I'm sure. Performance is haneous browsing, searching, updates cover art every time?

 

anyway, anyone have a better Mac solution for videos?

 

Chris

[Paul R]

Hi, sorry, 64GB of RAM in the system. After two days of dorking with Jriver, it doesn't support video playback for Macs in MC19. I'm sure it's awesome for you audio gurus, but it's not doing much for us movie addicts. I'm hoping MC20 will fix this or I paid a $50 DA tax

 

the performance issues I cite are Itunes. It's search features are very basic, no organizational features, etc. I have about 3TB like I said. I am working on ripping about 600 DVDs which will double the size and the issues, I'm sure. Performance is haneous browsing, searching, updates cover art every time?

 

anyway, anyone have a better Mac solution for videos?

 

Chris

 

On a multi-thousand dollar computer and you have issue with $50?

 

I hear video is coming to JRMC Mac, but no real idea of when. In the meantime, bootcamp into Windows and use the JRMC/Windows version. Works just great as a kludge.

[Eyeman]

On a multi-thousand dollar computer and you have issue with $50?

 

I hear video is coming to JRMC Mac, but no real idea of when. In the meantime, bootcamp into Windows and use the JRMC/Windows version. Works just great as a kludge.

 

Yea, it's completely wasted! I'll just wait and suffer with Itunes, I completely shed Microsoft products and it's been great. No endless calls to support, no endless patching, no reboots and no calls from family for tech support.

[Daudio]

the performance issues I cite are Itunes. It's search features are very basic, no organizational features, etc.

 

Chris,

 

I hear that iTunes 11 has some issues with Search, but I don't use it, so can't really say. I use iTunes 10 under OSX Mavericks, and have a system of genre based Playlist Folders to organize my music library, through there are many other ways to do it. So there are certainly "organizational features" in iTunes, one just has to dig a little deeper, then just buying the baddest hardware box available And, it sounds like you are really dissatisfied with features, not performance issues.

 

There are quite a few threads here on CA that discuss ways to organize music libraries in iTunes. Just do a search for them...

[mwheelerk]

replying to both of you on Jriver. I took your advice and bought it. The majority of my 3tb are movies (mp4 Itunes). It doesn't seem to manage those, am I right?

 

chris

Chris

The JRiver for Windows OS does handle video but the JRiver for Mac version does not. It is audio only.

[PhVL]

anyway, anyone have a better Mac solution for videos?

 

Chris

 

I use Plex for my videocollection.

Philippe

[Paul R]

Yea, it's completely wasted! I'll just wait and suffer with Itunes, I completely shed Microsoft products and it's been great. No endless calls to support, no endless patching, no reboots and no calls from family for tech support.

 

I do hear you brother - my problem is running into IBM or Cisco "Windows only" programs that I really need. Drives me bonkers sometimes.

 

-Paul

[Paul R]

I transcode all the video into a format that iTunes likes and just use iTunes. Works perfectly, streams perfectly, and does not give me half the grief DNLA does. And believe me, I have tried hard with DNLA. (*sigh*)

-Paul

 

 

anyway, anyone have a better Mac solution for videos?

 

Chris

 

I use Plex for my videocollection.

Philippe

[Audio_ELF]

My library, while smaller then yours, was perhaps more complicated, with many hierarchical playlist folders and playlists for each artist, composer, and various special categories, and quite a few 'cross posts' of the same tracks.

My experience is that having extensive "smart" playlists can cause a slow down with iTunes.

 

Where possible de-select "Live Updating"

 

Eloise

[mwheelerk]

My experience is that having extensive "smart" playlists can cause a slow down with iTunes.

 

Where possible de-select "Live Updating"

 

Eloise

This is a good point which I had forgotten about. Though my library is more modest (20,000+ files) I previously had performance issues with iTunes while using Smart Playlists. If you do have Smart Playlists where some automatic updating might occur (I had some based on number of plays and the date added to library) the issues were eliminated when "Live Updating" was deselected. I just got use to manually updating the playlist after having used it.

[Boris75]

 

849 GB | 172,150 tracks

 

My musical library uses up more space (920GB) but for only 24600 tracks. I guess the owner of this library is not into high-res or lossless music files...