something to aspire to

I thought I was doing pretty well with my music collection: about 200 GB. But Will Friedwald takes the cake with what's being called the world's largest iTunes collection. He's got 849 GB in there currently, for a whopping 809.2 days' worth of music there. 11,561 albums, 2935 artists. He says that's not even complete, he's got several sub-libraries that are gradually being added into the main library. I am in awe. The next time my boyfriend complains about my music-buying habit or the number of hard drives hooked up to our Mini, I'm going to point to this guy and say that I've got a long way to go before I'm as bad as he is.

I share a complaint about iTunes with Mr Friedwald. He says:

Essentially the problem is that iTunes was designed for people to buy music from the store, to put CDs on their iPods, and then, perhaps lastly, to store some of a personal CD collection in the library. It was NOT designed for what I am doing with it, which is to store, manage and access a major music collection of nearly 200,000 tracks. As a result, when I am working with the full 800 GB library, it is painfully slow, getting around the library, doing searches, and editing info on individual tracks or whole albums just takes forever!

Even with my piddly little collection, I'm running into the same kind of problem. My G4 Mac Mini is the machine running my collection. When I launch iTunes,it takes an extra couple of minutes to load the library. There's a noticeable lag in trying to do anything with tracks other than simply playing them. Editing information is the worst. While I'm not at Mr Friedwald's 3 minutes, there's a pause of several seconds.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 20, 2007
  Which makes my puny 34 gig library, uhm, puny. I use WMP, and it's quite fast at managing that library. I should probably expand my library, maybe including more olden songs and more than the 24 english songs I currently have... One day, I guess I hope to be rich enough to get a few externals for my music :) And, enjoy your music!

• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
  Just for the record: setting 593 items (4 days 18 hours, 7,76 Gb) to volume +100% took exactly 81 seconds in iTunes (MacBook Core Duo 2GHz) - wouldn't it be better if iTunes handles these kind of things in the background? We're in the year 2007, multithreading exists! ;)