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I have a lot of music files. No, I mean, a lot -- 35330, sez iTunes.
I've been carrying them around on USB hard drives for a while now. I figured, "Hey, I know... I have this new shiny Mac that Just Works, and I'll consolidate them on my desktop hard drive!"
Big mistake.
See, since iTunes 7, Apple added a "feature" called "gapless playback." This was designed to smoothly segue from one track to another on those albums where the tracks all do just blend together.
The problem? To do that, iTunes has to "determine gapless playback information"... for every single track. It's at the track level, not at the global level, and it can't be set as a preference by the user. It does this in increments of 453 songs at start-up. iTunes is slow as frozen molasses until it finishes.
Google gives 1400 hits on this problem. The number one hit goes back to 2006. It suggests a solution (select all your tracks, set "gapless album" to "no"). It also notes this solution doesn't work for everyone. {cough}
It may occur to the more mathematically minded that 35330 divided by 453 is about 78. I can look forward to this problem the next 78 times I start iTunes. I can't even just let iTunes run for a few days while it finishes this pointless job, because it only grabs things 453 tracks at a time, and, yet again, that isn't user-configurable.
Ah, Apple... So many hard-to-discover "features."
I should count my blessings. At least this isn't causing a Mac snow crash.
I've been carrying them around on USB hard drives for a while now. I figured, "Hey, I know... I have this new shiny Mac that Just Works, and I'll consolidate them on my desktop hard drive!"
Big mistake.
See, since iTunes 7, Apple added a "feature" called "gapless playback." This was designed to smoothly segue from one track to another on those albums where the tracks all do just blend together.
The problem? To do that, iTunes has to "determine gapless playback information"... for every single track. It's at the track level, not at the global level, and it can't be set as a preference by the user. It does this in increments of 453 songs at start-up. iTunes is slow as frozen molasses until it finishes.
Google gives 1400 hits on this problem. The number one hit goes back to 2006. It suggests a solution (select all your tracks, set "gapless album" to "no"). It also notes this solution doesn't work for everyone. {cough}
It may occur to the more mathematically minded that 35330 divided by 453 is about 78. I can look forward to this problem the next 78 times I start iTunes. I can't even just let iTunes run for a few days while it finishes this pointless job, because it only grabs things 453 tracks at a time, and, yet again, that isn't user-configurable.
Ah, Apple... So many hard-to-discover "features."
I should count my blessings. At least this isn't causing a Mac snow crash.
