As Far As I Can Tell

iTunes 7 album art memory leak

I was excited to see Apple’s new iPod offerings the other day and after reading about the accompanying new version of iTunes it seemed like a good upgrade. The feature I wanted the most was browsing by album art since iTunes has previously always focused on individual tracks rather than managing complete albums. Other media players, like the new Windows Media 11, already have a mode that visually groups songs into albums and displays the cover art.

Unfortunately their implementation makes it unusable because of the performance hit on my computer. There’s a memory leak involving album art where every time you see an album cover it loads and holds it into RAM. Even after you’ve switched modes, scrolled off screen, or minimized the application it doesn’t release it. As a test I watched my RAM hold steady as I scrolled through my library in regular song-based text mode. When switching to album art view the usage steadily increased as I scrolled, and the cover flow mode was even worse.

I like to leave iTunes open for weeks at a time and this memory leak makes that next to impossible unless I stick with the old viewing options. Hopefully they’ll fix this leak soon since this technical problem is inhibiting what is ultimately a better way to interact with full albums. It sad to see that not only the concept of iTunes is getting bloated (music, movies, tv, and now games!?), but the software code along with it.

View Comments (8)

# September 14, 2006 08:48 AM


 

Comments

I’ve been waiting for ages for Apple to fix the memory leak in Safari. Seems Flash and Safari don’t play nice, and I’ve seen my virtual memory usage shoot up past 1.2 GB on more than one occasion. iTunes, while not as bad as Safari, is still a hog. But at least there’s a (lame) workaround: don’t use the new features!

Posted by: Dave Chiu on September 14, 2006 6:49 PM

I hate iTunes. I absolutely hate it but I have to use it. Not for the iPod but because it does something that I absolutely love. When I either import music by CD or by dragging nor dropping, it automatically creates folders based on id3 tags embedded within the mp3 file. This helps with file organization as well as file renaming. If it wasn’t for that, I would not use it at all. No. Winamp is a fine example of what a mp3 player should be. It shouldn’t take 5-25 seconds to open a mp3 player. And no mp3 player should stutter for any reason. Although I knew that these new features such as cover flow would eat up resources, I am sorely disappointed in how the features are poorly implemented (ipod updating) or not at all (automatically downloading album art). Apple has always been kinda flaky when it comes to PC software and I don’t blame them but I feel as though this will hinder their movement to get people to “switch” if they can’t roll out such an important piece of software.

Posted by: jake on September 15, 2006 1:40 AM

The bloatedness is a bit dissapointing. You could see it coming though, just from the half assed video integration they added last year. I haven’t noticed the memory leak, but I’m going to check it out when I get my office.. The thing that I think kind of sucks, is that there’s not any intelligence built into finding the album art.. 90% of the stuff in my library has been ripped by iTunes, over 120 gigs worth of music. iTunes found artwork for maybe 25% of it, I think a little less.. Then again I guess if they don’t sell it in the ITMS then they won’t have the cover..

Posted by: Adam on September 18, 2006 2:34 PM

I just upgraded the memory in my G4 powerbook, and just for kicks tried to kill it with iTunes. If you remember the notification from iTunes before it began importing album artwork, information about missing artwork is sent to them…I assume they’ll be updating their databases.

Posted by: Dave Chiu on September 18, 2006 7:52 PM

Furthermore, What I’m waiting for is for Songbird to be done. In case you don’t know, it’s a cross-platform music player built on Firefox. This means that extensions can be written for it allowing for some exciting optimization and personalization possibilities. It also allows you to go to music blogs and it immediately finds .mp3 links and allows you to play them in the player. That’s pretty handy. There is always the threat of bloated software showing up but we’ll see… Right now, it’s in a very loose beta and I’m just waiting for them to tighten things up but I’m looking forward to being able to use that instead of iTunes.

Posted by: jake on September 18, 2006 9:31 PM

Wow, that really shows the problem Dave. I can’t believe they haven’t come out with a 7.01 to fix that issue yet. Hey Adam, I use a program called Album Art Cover Downloader to add artwork to my MP3s. It pulls from Amazon and lets you drag files in from the web too. Windows only unfortunately.

Posted by: Simon on September 18, 2006 9:34 PM

Hey Jake, Songbird looks pretty cool. Any word on if it will support syncing to the iPod? Right now that integration is what’s keeping me in iTunes. Over the summer I took scores of hours and went through my entire collection to correct all the ID3 tags including genre. My collection is so much more usable now, and since the data is in the files themselves it’s not that hard to switch players. I try not to get too attached to the usage data and other iTunes specific info.

Posted by: Simon on September 18, 2006 9:55 PM

I downloaded that widget that I believe you were referring to, the Amazon album cover art tool. It works really well as a one-click application that goes onto amazon.com and finds the cover art image for any song playing. I usually play one song off an album but highlight the whole album. when I click the widget again it adds that cover art image to all the selected songs. I haven’t had any problems with it yet.

Posted by: DougoBlue on September 20, 2006 11:40 AM

As far as who can tell?


Chicago, IL

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