iTunes is a piece of software that lets you add to, organize and play your digital media collection on your computer, as well as sync it to a portable device. It's a jukebox player along the lines of MusicMatch and Windows Media Player, and you can use it on a Mac or Windows machine. The most significant difference between iTunes and some other media players is the built-in iTunes Music Store (where you can get podcasts, music videos, movies, audiobooks and TV shows, too) and its multi-level integration with Apple's iPod portable media player.
What's New:
- iTunes 7.3.2 provides bug fixes to improve stability and performance.
Download: iTunes 7.3.2
View: Apple iTunes Website
What's New:
- iTunes 7.3.2 provides bug fixes to improve stability and performance.
Download: iTunes 7.3.2 View: Apple iTunes Website
Last edited by bangbang023 on 03 Aug 2007 - 01:09
... or rather Apple trying to stay one step ahead of the DRM-strippers by changing the algorithms again?
Each cover takes 1 mb of ram when using coverflow, so as you scroll through, iTunes uses more and more RAM, up to 1mb/album or your total available memory, whichever is lower. Only when it consumes all available memory does it begin to page/cache to virtual memory, though iTunes forgets what it's already processed earlier in the session. Doh!
It's a real memory management mess right now (I've seen iTunes go up to 1.5GB of ram!
I just scrolled through my entire library and it slowly ate up a gig of memory.. it was fairly quick though. When this feature was new all the pictures took ages to actually show up, thus rendering the feature all the more pointless...
But it did dump 700MB of that gig as soon as I pressed view button to leave cover flow. I don't really see that there is any other way of doing the feature to be honest. The pictures are of a size.. if you want to flip through them in that 3D interface then they need to be loaded into memory. What else can be done.. ?
If 70% weren't dumped then I would have said you have a point, but it's not too bad as is. I would never use it for looking through my entire library anyway. For a playlist of a few hundred tracks it's fine.
It's not all that complicated to program. What they have now is EXTREMELY lazy coding - uncompressed images pageflipped through nigh infinite RAM. Sloppy sloppy sloppy.
A music player feature shouldn't be able to take 2 gb of RAM, haha.
It's not all that complicated to program. What they have now is EXTREMELY lazy coding - uncompressed images pageflipped through nigh infinite RAM. Sloppy sloppy sloppy.
A music player feature shouldn't be able to take 2 gb of RAM, haha.
The problem with dumping to disk for read/writing of a large Cover cache would cause even more accusations of 'apple is killing my hd with all this unneeded thrashing'.
Allowing morons to select how much RAM itunes tries to take from the OS? Are you insane? Are you one of the people who disabled the swapfile in Windows, or set it to some stupidly low level?
Um, this is how Adobe Photoshop does it, so I figured the Mac programmers might understand this model better. They could always set it at an arbitrary value, or a percentage, or a default that users might not be able to change. Regardless, a media player shouldn't grab ALL AVAILABLE RAM.
And what's with the flame bait "morons" comment and the following blatant non-sequitur? What the hell does allowing people to limit iTunes's maximum memory footprint (since mine is now 2gb) have to do with the occasional odd uber-tweaker who screws with their swapfile settings ad nauseum?
Actually, iTunes already does that once it's grabbed ALL your available RAM. But without the data being cached, the thrashing to the pagefile occurs for no reason. LAME.
COULD YOU VAGUE THAT UP FOR ME PLEASE!?
Last edited by bangbang023 on 04 Aug 2007 - 11:51
People don't need to install this to have quicktime by the way.
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