[rsksmbms1]

I have 21,000 songs on itunes, along with album covers. itunes has gotten just about impossible to shuffle through. It plays all right, but if I want to do anything in itunes (burn a cd, make a party shuffle, move in itunes) you get the ball spinning for a couple of seconds. Which may not seem bad, but it happens all the time. Should I split up itunes or something. Help

[mdawson]

Well it would be helpful to know what type of system you are running iTunes on.

Aside from that your real problem most likely has little to do with your library and is an issue with your hard drive (see my post in this thread for more details). iTunes is constantly accessing your hard drives as is typical of (proper) database design.

iTunes is always initially sluggish when I attempt to do something after waking the computer or if the drive that my content is stored on has spun down; I can hear the drive accelerating whenever I get the spinning beach ball. Once the drive has spun up it is most operations work as expected. The same thing occurs when I create or modify records in my Music Collector database. So what you are likely facing is a disk latency issue.

[viralata]

I was having almost the same problem. In my case, I found that it was related to some plug-ins that I had downloaded from APPLE. I am not 100% sure but I am pretty certain the worst offender was something called "Album Art Thingie" or something like that. These plug-ins are trying to go to the internet and look for album art or something like that all the time. You change a song and BINGO, the plug-in freezes things for a second or two while it does something. I removed all the plug-ins and the problem went away for me. I have over 30000 songs and about 1000 movies and it works just as smooth as silk now.