Sluggish iTunes
Posted by Pierre Igot in: iTunes, MusicJuly 25th, 2003 • 10:29 pm
Today I’m reminded of the reason why I don’t use iTunes to burn music CDs more often. (I typically use Toast Titanium 5.) I have it burning a CD in the background right now, and my whole machine feels somewhat sluggish. I keep hearing bursts of activity from the recorder, and each time I hear such noise, there is a bit of a hick-up in the Mac OS X interface, no matter where I am or what I am doing.
As well, MenuMeters says that both my processors are almost at the peak of their power level (more or less 90%). All this just for burning an audio CD in the background? I have a dual 1.25 GHz machine, for crying out loud.
Whenever I burn a CD with Toast in the background, there is absolutely no disruption in the interface (except when the CD is ready), and it’s actually faster than iTunes! And it doesn’t use nearly as much CPU power.
What iTunes does that requires so much processing power, I have no idea. But this thing is clearly not optimized for speed and non-intrusiveness. Just how many people do you know who just stare at their computer screen for 15 or 20 minutes doing nothing while the computer is burning a CD? We’re in 2003. People are multitasking all the time. Mac OS X is supposed to be optimized for such situations. Get with the program, Apple.