Why did iTunes take so long to download?
I'm lost in space
Today, if you didn’t know, Apple had a “Let’s Rock” event[1] where they debuted a few new portable music player models, and a new version of their music playing application. You’d think from all the hoopla surrounding it, that the Rapture was occurring. Weeks of speculation about colour and physical dimensions of the new iPods (some people actually get excited and obsess about things like this…), leaked screenshots of iTunes 8, speculation about Steve Job’s health, etc., combined with world-wide streaming video broadcasts of the event, and coverage from every mainstream media outlet, that this was something huge. Considering the runaway success of the iPod (I think both the Queen and the Pope have one, along with a couple of hundred million other people), it is certainly a big event for Apple, and definitely carries enough broad interest for the media to report. But c’mon… really…
Anyway, what I found interesting was much more mundane than the any of the announcements. What caught my attention was in how long it took for the two software updates (QuickTime 7.5.5 and iTunes 8) to download. It wasn’t really all that big of a download, approximately 120MB combined, and I would normally expect it to take around 1 to 2 minutes with my DSL connection. What surprised me was that it took almost 10 minutes to download[2]. Now, it certainly wasn’t a problem for me with it taking this long to down, but it got me thinking — I’ve noticed a bit of a trend recently in the length of time it takes to download updates for the Mac.
Up until, say, the beginning of this year, anytime I grabbed a software update from Apple for my Mac, it typically downloaded at, or near, the top speed of my DSL link. However, over the past few months, anytime I’ve downloaded an update, it’s seemed like it’s getting slower and slower. At the same time, I keep reading little snippets of how sales of the Mac keep breaking records each quarter. Additionally, a surprising number of friends and acquaintances have “switched” from using Windows to using Mac OS (that, of course, is simply anecdotal, but it may be indicative of a general market shift). Maybe, just maybe, the slower update downloading is a symptom of sheer number of Apple machines out “in the wild”?
Maybe… but then again, maybe not. Of course, this specific iTunes update isn’t just for Macs only. Anyone running iTunes (both Mac and Windows) is a candidate for updating. And many of them probably did. Just like when the update servers kinda-sorta briefly melted down two months ago with the iPhone 3G/MobileMe release (which was for both Mac and Windows users), the traffic from Windows users may have swamped the traffic from Mac OS users. Apple certainly isn’t saying, nor would I expect them to. However, I have noticed that Mac OS-only updates, which would have zero traffic from Windows users, are pokey as well, compared to this time last year.
In the end, I’m happy for Apple if this perceived slowdown is indeed pointing to their commercial success. Quite a change from the dark days of the mid-90’s, when almost no-one believed (including myself) that Apple would survive into the 21st century, joining the ranks of companies such as Commodore, Atari, etc. It did take Steve Jobs riding back to Apple on a magical unicorn to turn them around (hence everyone’s obsession with his health — the last time he left Apple, the company went into the shitter).
Incidentally, the new iTunes is pretty nice — the “Genius” track selection is surprisingly good, and the new visualizer kicks ass. Really. I could watch it for hours. Even sober.
- I believe that back in mists of time, ‘rock’ used to be a somewhat rebellious form of music. Now, it’s a term mostly reserved for advertisements for everything from shampoo to candy bars, and is meant to evoke some sort of excitement. [↩]
- And no, it wasn’t my DSL being busy with transferring other data – I had plenty of bandwidth free. I doubt that my ISP’s connection to the internet backbone was clogged either, since I was able to access other sites without any noticeable slowdown. And remember: this is an anecdotal account… [↩]
The genius thing royally fuct my iTunes library. It crashed iTunes twice and completely corrupted my directory (I think… you know I’m completely technophobic) so I decided to just shut it off… Maybe it’s best to stop poking myself in the eye instead of asking why it hurts every time I do it? Anyway, I’m not sure if this is because I am running my library from an external hard drive? Anyway, I am still manually going through everything and rebuilding and it’s making me cranky. Possibly an iTunes thing in general? Or maybe a peripheral thing? I dunno, but I figured you’d post something about the release and you could possibly be interested. Or not. But the visualizer is a goodly amount of fun (sober or otherwise :D).
Variations on a theme: updating Quicktime, upon restarting my beloved computer, all my playlists randomly were deleted from iTunes… As were a small chunk of the mp3’s that I had to add back (I really don’t have the patience for this!)… All related to running iTunes in my internal and my mp3’s being housed in my external hard drive? Related at all or just a weird coincidence. You can be the judge.
Any rate, I figure that I am not alone in the world and if this is happening to me, it is likely happening to others… Possibly yourself (cue ominous music here).
That is really terrible – I’d be furious as well if the update messed up my music library. Thankfully, my upgrade went well.
For what it’s worth, I also have my iTunes library on an external drive, with approximately 15,000 music tracks, and around 300 or so video files. More precisely, the media files are on an external drive on a server in my closet, and my main workstation mounts that drive over the network (so it’s sort of external, once removed I guess). However, my iTunes library files are on the workstation’s hard drive, and that’s what stores all the pointers to the actual media files. I’m going to guess that when iTunes crashed on you, the library files are what got messed up. And yeah – it’d be a royal pain to figure out what’s missing (along with losing various meta data about the media such as number of times played, ratings, etc.)
Unless you have the library files backed up, there’s not much you can do about recovering it short of manually fixing up the problems. That said, it really shouldn’t have happened in the first place – in fact, I can’t remember the last time iTunes crashed on me. Maybe your disk drive needs some structural repair? Try running ‘Disk Utility’ in the ‘Applications->Utilities’ folder. Select ‘Verify Disk’ on your internal hard drive, then run ‘Repair Permissions’ and see if that helps things. If you get some weird messages, it’s best to make an appointment with a ‘Genius’ at the Apple Store and have them take a look at your machine.
And I won’t mention anything about making regular backups. Ooops. I just did… If it makes you feel any better, take a gander at my tale of “I don’t need no stinking backups” here.
I know where the Disc Utility is :P Give me a *little* credit! I ran it and this is what I found:
permissions differ on “private/var/log/secure.log”, should be -rw——- , they are -rw-r—– .
Permissions differ on “System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.usbmuxd.plist”, should be -rw-r–r– , they are -rwxr-xr-x .
Group differs on “private/etc/cups”, should be 0, group is 26.
Anyway, when I took this beast to the Genius Bar initially, I was told all my troubles that I was having had to do with the fact that I had about 4GB of free space, which would be fine except for the fact that I am running File Vault. I was urged to get an external drive, clear out the clutter and turn off the program. Not so simple, but I’ll not get into that. The reason I mention this, is that I suspect this is the same kind of issue. It’s much lesser version of the same weirdness I had before my adventures in external hard drives and computer illiteracy… So, checking through everything, my actual mp3’s are all fine, it’s just the communication between iTunes and my hard drive that is getting muddled (small miracles)… And it was just playing with the “Genius” option to see if iTunes could really make cohesive playlists. Before crashing, I learned that it isn’t that amazing but still better than random. Oh yes, and upgrading QuickTime (but that might have just been a coincidence).
Backups are good and I do one every week or so… There is very little that gets added on in between time that is so valuable to me… Now, if I had as massive an mp3, video and photo collection as you, it might be a different story! Also, I am happy to see that you are still alive and thanks for your input! I hope all is well in your wasteland!
In a slightly related theme, a song that reminded me of you just popped up on iTunes. I guess that, not only is iTunes 8 very snappy, it has done some kind of freaky mind meld and is capable of generating playlists accordingly!
The amount of suspense that surrounds an Apple announcement is beyond ridiculous. It was interesting about 5 years ago when Apple was churning out innovative, new things with every announcement, but now it just seems like more of the same. Apple has their assault on San Franciscan conference centers, sold out to the press, only to announce new colors for the iPod nano or an over-glorified iTunes update.
I personally, I couldn’t care less for having a phone with a bunch of whiz-bang features like a web browser and a bunch of pointless applications (See: I Am Rich) for download, so events like these don’t mean much to me. But they also give Apple’s events all around less significance. What’s exciting is the imminence of new Apple computer products, or expansion into new technological sectors.
What I think I’m trying to say is that the iPod is old and quite frankly boring. It’s really difficult to get excited over the fifteenth re-hash of the same basic product idea. It’s easy to get excited about a new Apple computer, like the MacBook Air (despite it being a bit of a disappointment) since Apple only really sells six different computers.
my itunes8 download is taking 3 hours…..god damn
dude your lucky as hell… mine is still downloading on 1% and ive been waiting 30 minutes. and its not coz i have shitty connection coz i usually download things extremely quick but 4 some reason this is takin ages