iTunes performance on my PC has just been dragging lately. Seriously. Whether it’s adding files, syncing stuff up, or just fixing title case, I feel like I can have iTunes open or everything else.
“This is probably because my library’s so big,” I concluded. I’ve been reading up on splitting libraries, moving libraries to USB drives, storing your library on Amazon’s file servers, and a bunch of other plans and schemes, but no real guidelines on how big is too big. (Then again, if they sell an 80GB iPod, they have to expect that people will have libraries that big, and not because they’ve bought Pirates of the Caribbean 120 times.)
Further research inspired an uncomfortable realization: Smart Playlists might maybe wreak havoc on system performance. And why shouldn’t they? If you have a Recently Played or Most Frequently Played playlist, then those are updated every time a song is played. If you have a Top Rated playlist, it’s updated every time a song is rated. And if you have a “Brit’s Greatest Hits” playlist, with Artist Name = “Britney Spears” and My Rating greater than three stars, then every renamed file checks with that playlist to see if the new metadata qualifies it for inclusion.
(Implementation note: I think you could update playlists only on viewing, or on iPod syncs, but playlist sharing and other implementation trivia might get in the way of that. I don’t know how this is stored, much less how it’s optimized, so I could be talking out of my butt on this specific point.)
I may or may not have a larger library than the average iTunes user (it looks like there are certainly power users well beyond my 100GB), but I would be willing to bet I’m in the top 1% of Smart Playlist junkies. I have created SPs for:
- Artist discographies
- Year-end Best ofs
- BPM filtering (yeah, right, for all the DJing I do)
- Diagnostics (songs with obviously bad years, no album title, etc.)
- Favorites lists
- Genre-based mood lists
- Artist “groups”, to keep musical families or record labels together
- Odd queries (which four-star songs haven’t I heard in three months? what have I imported but not listened to yet? what have I heard a million times but not rated?)
- Year-based reminiscing (rock albums from 1992 to 1995)
- Filetype filtering, because sometimes other programs really want MP3s and not anything else
My love for this feature probably borders on abuse, and the stark fact is that I have a lot of very large smart playlists that I only very rarely use, or could recreate almost immediately if it came to that. I had no idea I was suffocating it with my love. A lot of these are playlists that could be converted, after they query the database once, to regular playlists, and I wouldn’t miss much.
So that theory makes sense. Unfortunately, I can’t find a really thorough discussion of the problem beyond 2005ish, and iTunes has gone through many updates and enhancements since then. Someone described smart playlists as tiny little applications themselves. iTunes operates at an acceptable level with 100 smart playlists of varying sizes and complexities, but if you’re starting to become performance-oriented, they might be dragging your system down.
Regardless, I wiped most of the dynamic playlists from my iTunes (converting some to regular playlists), and it seems like it’s a little peppier today. Again, it is completely possible that there’s a release note with iTunes 5 or 6 or 7 that says “fixed the problems with smart playlists - create as many as you want now”, but it seems reasonable to think that smart playlists might be best used in moderation.
(I made an exception for the three gigantic playlists that fill my iPod: 20GB of recently added files, 20GB of top rated files, and 20GB of frequently played files. I absolutely cannot put my iPod into manual file-draggy mode. Never.)
