itunes/ipod stuff

[mrtristan]

First, let me say that I love my ipod. The first thing I did after Christmas was get an itrip fm transmitter, so I can listen to my songs on my radio earmuffs. I also use itunes as my media player for audio files and I like it for the most part. The features and useability are great. I've bought a small collection of songs from the music store, which I also like.

Now for the bad. Itunes doesn't run very smoothly. It takes a while for it to recognize a cd or my ipod. It rips fast and the quality is good, but it eats up a lot of memory and cpu. It's the only program that has ever bogged down my machine.

Back when I was experimenting with different encoding settings, I would often have two or three tmpgenc applications running. This didn't bog down my machine at all, even though the cpu usage was at 100%. It seems like any time something related to itunes changes, my whole computer stalls until itunes figures out what it is. This could be the ejection of a cd, ejection of my ipod, or even just playing a song off the music store.

Itunes is also one of the only programs to crash on me. IE also crashes, which is why I switched to firefox.

Just tonight, I noticed that itunes seems to unplug itself from windows from time to time. In the task manager, itunes would toggle between "running" and "not responding," while updating my ipod.

Anway, I stick with it mainly because it's a pain in the ass to use more than one media player. I have all my playlists set up, I like the music store, and I use itunes to sync my ipod. I hope apple fixes the bugginess in version 5.0. (All of the versions of 4.X are buggy to me)

Anyone else have similar feelings?

[Faustus]

Have you checked to see if maybe you have a computer problem? IE should be crash prone like that. Neither has itunes given my PC many problems. (it does use alot of ram I will admit) I guess I'm saying it sounds like you have bigger problems in your system.

[mrtristan]

It might be system related. I just did a clean OS install, so everything's been running smoothly, so far.

Generally speaking, my system has been getting less and less stable, but I can't isolate the point of failure. I've been wanting to upgrade for a while now, so maybe itunes will run better when I do.

I also have itunes on my work computer and my wife's mac, but I don't use either one as much as my personal pc, so it's hard to evaluate whether it really is this particular pc or itunes.

[Faustus]

Hard to track down you say. If after your clean install it persist then here is my advice.

Do you know how to use a voltmeter? If so get a $20 power supply tester and test for consistancy in the PSU.

Or if thats not an option find someplace with a liberal return policy (like Fry's, NOT CompUSA) and try replacing the PSU for a week with something good like an Antec or Enermax.

Also if you have any type of memory testing software let it run on the machine overnight at least. Of course I've seen software like memtest say ram is good when in the end it was bad. But it will check for SOME errors.

[Garibaldi]

I'm not sure what is wrong with your itunes problem, but I do have something to add that you might be interested in. There is an app for Linux (if you ever decide to use it or are in this situation) called amaroK, which is similar to itunes and DOES support ipods:
http://amarok.kde.org
Just a sidenote incase your interested.