What is Digg?Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inaccurate
Readers have reported that this story contains information that may not be accurate.180 Comments
- gfw123, on 10/12/2007, -10/+49It could be a problem with your multi-reverberating endoplasmic reticulum unit. I would check that first.
..and yes, I do know what I am talking about, I have a masters degree, in science. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+45iTunes has never been a great performer for me.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+41Who knew Apple was working with Microsoft to make iTunes 7 Vista Capable?! Memory intensive and laggy!
- kevbryant, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30what do you expect folks? 100 or so cached images waiting for fluid animation is going to take up memory. if you have a puny system, don't use the cover flow option. it is just an option!
- Hickeroar, on 10/12/2007, -15/+38Adding ram won't help a specific program stop using excess ram... Your logic is.....flawed.
- mecole21, on 10/12/2007, -6/+30what an amazing concept! u mean to tell me if i have a crappy 5 year old computer, I can't use all the new features on new software?
- dclowd9901, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20ITUNES 7 WILL EAT YOUR SLEEPING BABIES!
(/come on.) - RadiantBeing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12It's CoverFlow. In standard view, iTunes uses 30-40mb. When I go into CoverFlow, I can get memory usage as high as 245 MB scrolling back and forth through my 247 album collection. Once it gets that high, it stays there even when I'm not scrolling. After returning to standard view, it decreases to 140mb and stays there. Closing and reopening iTunes in standard view gets back to the original 30-40 mb usage again. In comparison, the standalone version CoverFlow uses max 82 mb on my computer.
- import, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14I would also suggest checking out your flux capacitor, it tends to hog memory.
- festriaqua, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14i put my itunes in cover flow feature, and its takin up about 90-95% of my processor, and also about 500mb of ram, i cant get the dam thing to play any songs, nothing responces when i click on it....no music for me till next patch T_T
- aeproberts, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11The problem is not that it uses a lot of memory when using coverflow....the problem is that does not free up that memory when you return to normal view.
@mecole21
That is not an old computer issue, it is a software issue. - corneliousjd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9yes - its only in cover flow. i have 7,000 some odd songs (around 40 gigs) and ALL have cover art, when in coverflow mode it uses up about 500 - 700 megs of ram once i browsed through all the art till it loaded... but when i swich back to album view (the middle view) which is what i prefer, its a nice clean method it uses about 150 megs, whcih isn't bad on something with over a gig of ram.
if you can't handle it switch to classic list view. - rkudasik, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Too funny, I was just sitting here cursing at iTunes for hogging all my memory when this article came across my feed...
- tw0bit, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11mine was up to 120,000 K after i viewed all of the album art in the new viewer...it lagged up my whole computer. Its the album art
- Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -9/+16I know what's happening to him! He's using the cover flow feature, and has the album covers at full size, or close to it.
I would recommend at least a Gig of RAM if you want to use the "Cover flow" feature, and even at that don't make the size of the covers too, big. The only way you would get away with that is if you had the new iMac's with at least a Gig of RAM, and with the MacPro obviously. - sjbdallas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I'm at about 65mb on mine. 50gb of music, about 1/2 of it has the cover art so far.
- KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7You do realize that when you play videos in iTunes it's really just playing them in Quicktime don't you? iTunes basically just "skins" the video.
- skoles, on 10/12/2007, -7/+13You mean there's a problem with Windows and software reguarding memory leaks?!!
- sjbdallas, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6PIDGE: I rip all my CDs at 192 and keep them on a portable drive (archived on my home pc). I usually only stick about 20GB on my ipod.
I spoke too soon on the memory issue. While playing music in iTunes, the memory usage steadily grows. When it reaches about 200mb, i start to see performance hits and I have to pause for a few minutes to drop the memory back down to about 15mb, then i start playing again and let it grow. cycled through this a few times now. - chrismm, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8I don't know what your problem is. Maybe you could be a bit more descriptive about exactly you were doing when this happened. Hell, not to sound all crazy but you might even consider spending a bit of time filing a bug report instead of bitching about it in your blog/digg.
chrism 21888 4.6 0.6 389564 6780 ?? S 1:44PM 22:52.86 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes -psn_0_41287681
chrism 214 0.0 0.0 330044 340 ?? S 22Aug06 0:01.90 /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunesHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesHelper -psn_0_1048577 - lamestory, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I love that anything bad posted about Apple gets instantly marked as inaccurate. Such lemmings you applelosers are.
- Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -10/+15Did I say at least a Gig, sorry I meant at least 2 Gigs!
- Sparticuz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5it's apple bots burying the bad apple stories
[/sarcasm] - nogoodreason, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Whenever I add my own covers to iTunes, I make sure the images are no bigger than 200x200 pixels (simply to keep the file small, easy to load and to not clog up CoverFlow)
What I'd be interested to know is how big the ones iTunes now adds automatically are. I have a sneaking suspicion they're a lot bigger, and contributing to this memory hog. - dkm201, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Yeah, if it can't happen to you, it can't happen to anyone else! Inaccurate, I say!
To the trenches! - op12, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Seems more like iTunes did some poor integration/implementation. As mentioned in some comments above, Cover Flow as a standalone application was not a huge memory hog (around 80-90MB of memory usage).
- SimonKay, on 10/12/2007, -1/+640 MB normally
73 MB with the cover browser turned on
120 MB paging through the cover art in the cover browser
(3 year old PowerBook G4 with 1.5 GB of RAM) - r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Apple has had cover art since iTunes Music Store began, just didn't have Coverflow. Get your facts right first.
- brendanc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Almost seems like they intentionally made it slower for PCs...
- thinkdifferent, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5@dustyshadow
You have to understand how images are handled in memory vs on disk. Let's say I have a 200x200 image. While that might only be 70kb on disk, when it is loaded into memory, the compression isn't there any more. Effectively 200x200 = 40,000 pixels. With 32bit color per pixel, that's 1,280,000 bits in memory, or about 1.2MB/image. Thus if you have 600 albums, the raw images alone in memory for cover flow is about 732MB.
Depending on how well your OS handles memory swapping, and how much physical RAM you have that amount might partly be virtual memory (hard drive). Reading from disk is significantly slower than from RAM. If you happen to be using IDE drives, whose controllers are run by the CPU instead of an onboard chip like SCSI, you'll see a CPU spike and lag when trying to read from virtual memory.
Additionally, since the animation of CoverFlow can be implemented as textures on 3D surfaces, using OpenGL to render them. If you have an older video card, or one with a limited amount of memory, this can become another bottleneck point.
Essentially, CoverFlow can be demanding of resources on your machine. If you're stuck with older hardware, don't use that feature or expect it will thrash your machine more significantly. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6You've got bigger issues than iTunes if 120MB of RAM usage is bogging down your whole computer... get rid of the 286sx.
- tsupersonic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I think for a media player, it's a big memory hog. Even on a fast machine by today's standards, iTunes 7 for Windows is slow. I am definetly not using iTunes 7 until they fix up the many flaws it created for me: memory hog, my iPod doesn't work. I have about 2000 songs and about 75% cover art for the songs in my library. I am not using the Cover Flow view, and it's still taking up lots of RAM. For people saying get more RAM, I have 2 GB of RAM, that should be damn plenty enough. Windows Media Player 11 is looking good and Winamp and VLC are great multimedia players.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4450Mb here, with 6000 songs, most with album art. On a macbook pro 2.0ghz.
- yoyoyoyo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7from xbox360 games to computer software -- this rushed development & buggy code is becoming an all to common occurrence. the whole attitude of "oh well, we'll just patch it later" sucks and shouldn't be tolerated.
what ever happened to testing code? could you imagine if we brought home Super Mario Bros. 3 back in the day and it was full of bugs? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3My PC locks up (reboot to fix). An I have 2 gigs of ram and all the latest hardware as of four months ago. Apple support e-mailed back and told me to down grade until a fix is made available. It has something to do with the latest firmware for My video IPOD and v7 ITunes not playing nice. I lost all of my purchased music also. They said once I downgrade they will let me download all of the songs again. Not looking forward to downloading 15 gigs of songs from Apple (15 gigs didn't cost me a cent Avis+travel everyday for a year = *****-ton of free ITunes.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Just flush itunes down the iCrapper and get a program that works like WMP 11.
- mrman5917, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Mine is at 45MB, down 12 from the previous version. Sounds like you have some issues with your library.
- willjh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4600 Mb sounds a bit extreme, but i have seen my itunes running at about 100Mbs, when the previous version was only using 60-70. V.7 looks great though!
- flubba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+380 mb of ram.
ill stick to winamp. - sputza, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6iTunes is very slow now. I get poor video playback when running any apps other than iTunes. This is happening with all our developers PCs at work. Ver 7 is a crapshoot!
- Netmindstorm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4600+ MB you say, well we now know where at least part of Wil Wheaton's itunes collection went.(http://digg.com/apple/Wil_Wheaton_Apple_iTunes_gave_me_back_all_my_lost_music_free_of_charge)
- easycheez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Actually I have noticed a 5 fold increase in stories marked inaccurate over the last 24-48 hours, anyone else notice this? And the linked pages seem relevant and correct.
- gweedo767, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@dustyshadow:
Lets do a little math why don't we. Lets say that the images used in CoverArt are 256x256 images. That makes for 65536 pixels we need to store in RAM for fast access. Now, lets say your display is set to 24bit color. That many pixels @ 24 bits each = 1572864 bits or 192KB per image. Now, I have a fairly small music collection based on others I know and have around 280 albums. So that means around 54MB of ram to load all those pieces of cover art.
Now, I just resized my CoverArt view to as large as I could hit on my 1920x1200 display and the cover art ended up at around 630x540 and it still looked great. So, lets drop it a bit and say that Apple is doing the art at around 600x500, based on our previous calculations we end up with around 246MB of raw data at that point. If you have more albums and it is caching all of it in RAM, that # will grow quickly.
As an interesting not, right now Task Manager says that iTunes.exe is using around 238MB of RAM...so maybe I am about right on the resolution they store those images at... - pingveno, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It also uses 38% of your CPU. Is there any reason you can think of for that? (genuine question)
- rjcarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3What do you mean "hogging your memory"? Would you rather have unused memory?
I don't think most people understand operating systems and memory management. Applications will take as much free memory as needed and that is available. If you were to fire up some other memory intensive app itunes would get paged and everything would be fine.
Why buy gigs of memory if you don't want your apps to use it? Let the OS do its job and schedule the memory use as necessary. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Games = Software. Games are patched all the time. Now that gaming systems are connected to the net and games are becoming more complex we will see many patches in the future.
Apple should have tested their own software on their own hardware. Apple is telling me it is not my PC but their crappy firmware and v7 ITunes not working together, which is inexcusable. - Sparticuz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3idk about you, but i don't want to change the view, exit itunes, and restart itunes everytime i want to get into photoshop or something.
- pyrates, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If only digg would add a feature that lets us know who marks stuff as innacurate. Then it would be nice if we could set it so that we can ignore them for marking it as inaccurate. Thus any future articles that they mark as inaccurate, no longer show up as inaccurate when you're logged in under your account. Or we could simply add a vote that says they are simply biased against a particular topic like apple and for the digg community in general not to count it when they try to mark an article as innacurate.
As for why itunes 7 cover flow feature runs better on a mac then a pc, it's because they're most likely using the graphics acceleration with the GPU that the Mac OS now uses instead of the CPU to do it. When vista comes out though, they'll be able to use the same feature that the Mac OS has.
And they definately brought this out just to one up zune for sure. Inaccurate my ass! To them as long as itunes returns all the memory to windows when it exits, it'll work for the time being. Be prepared to see a patch coming. Since zune was a complete copy with a few enhancements here and their, they had to release it early.
But call it what it is, a BUG! You can't blame windows for everything mac zealots. - jeb00d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3haven't you tried ml_ipod? That's what i used until I woke up and bought a mac.
- mas4977, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Whatever! Apple puts out a iTunes 7.0 = Garbage and its windows fault? Try reading through some forums and maybe you will find out that MAC users are also having problems.
Try being informed next time! -
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