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Comment by jakebasile | Hacker News Reader

All I want for Christmas is a standalone native Apple Music application for Mac and Windows (and Linux, why not?). I'd accept an Electron "native" application, even.

I own a 2016 MacBook Pro and a custom built Windows gaming machine with an i7-7700, GTX 1080ti, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, and a 1TB SSD and on both systems iTunes lags terribly. I sometimes can't even drag the window around without slideshow rendering. Updating takes 2-3 minutes and sometimes requires a restart (for a media app!). It's time to rewrite - maybe this is the start of that?

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I simply do not believe this.

I have a loaded 2017 13" MacBook Pro (i7, 16GB RAM) and iTunes is fine.

A few months before that my machine was the least-powerful 2015 MacBook Air (11", i5) and iTunes was fine on that too.

The problems are much more pronounced on my Windows machine but I assure you the iTunes experience is far worse than that of Spotify. I have no reason to lie about it.

It's a big enough application, I'm sure some people have issues with it under certain workloads.

I'm the same as you however -- I've never had issues with iTunes performance. I don't love the design, I'm glad they're simplifying it, but it always performed better than Spotify for me (which is the main reason I switched actually; I found the Spotify app to be terrible).

I simply do not believe this.

Your profile implies that you write software for a living, and you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"? Especially with something that has the breadth of iTunes, along with the vast number of users, I'm most certainly willing to believe that there are cases of iTunes not running well on powerful machinery.

> you're going with "resolved: works on my machine"?

We're on a casual forum, all evidence here is anecdotal, and I don't work for Apple, so yeah.

> write software for a living

> resolved: works on my machine

Haven't we all thought this at least once in our careers?

Thought it? Hell, I've got the sticker: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-works-on-my-machine-certif...

Got a 2013 MBP (also i7, 16Gb RAM) and iTunes flies on it. It's perfectly usable on my i5 T440 with 8Gb of RAM on windows 10 as well.

The only thing that pisses me off about it is the ellipsis next to the track names on the song list.

IJLTH https://swinsian.com/

This looks like a great solution for those with a local music collection, but unfortunately my main use for iTunes is for Apple Music. I don't keep music on my drive.

upvote isn't enough: I love swinsian! Switched over to using it after iTunes introduced a bug where an annoying popup happens if you turn off wifi and try to play a song.

This looks damn good! Trying it now.

I gave up on Apples' Music app .. and just use VLC, now.

There is something very liberating about using VLC on iOS, and managing my own music archive, manually. Sure, it feels like 1996 all over again - but at least I know exactly where I stand, and what I'm bringing with me, with VLC.

On Mac OS X an app doesn't do anything if you drag it across the screen. If that causes problems they are caused somewhere else.

For instance if you open a million large windows so they don't fit in your graphics card memory the system will fail to composite them smoothly.

I never have performance issues with iTunes other than the rendering in Apple Music views, but I feel like that's more of how the code is written than iTunes itself struggling.

My main issue with AM at least is that when I add music to my library, I wind up getting a bugged library. As in, there is music I added to my library 3 months ago that for whatever reason is always at the top of my most recently added music. I haven't touched it since adding, but it winds up being on top of my actual most recently added music. That's definitely a bug.

How about Vox? https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

I'm a pretty big fan of Vox. If you're looking for a stripped down iTunes/Foobar2000-like player for Mac it's a good option.

In addition to local media, there's even Soundcloud integration if you get your tracks from there, which beats using their web app.

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