User

04.01.2007 21:49:04

I have a ton of itunes playlists and when I access them via remote buddy menu it takes forever to load and really slows the computer down... 

User

04.01.2007 23:07:01

Hello Larry,

thanks for letting me know.

The problem here is, that Remote Buddy currently uses Apple's 
official API for getting the playlists: AppleScript.

I'm thinking of a faster alternative, though.

Best regards, 
Felix 

User

23.03.2007 02:16:50

I'd second a faster way to do this. I've been thinking Remote Buddy was broken when I try to access a play list with more than 300 or so items. I finally left it sitting for about 5 minutes and it finally came up. 

User

23.03.2007 14:00:54

Yes, iTunes and AppleScript can be incredibly slow.

For a software project I did a while ago I had to solve the same problem. I located iTunes Music Library.xml which should be easy to find and parsed the XML using Cocoa's Property List API, IIRC.

Since it's only concurrent read access it should be pretty headache free. ;)

Regards, 
Dennis 

User

23.03.2007 16:17:01

Yes, absolutely. The AppleScript & iTunes combo can be incredibly 
slow. And locating a single track or playlist from the info in the 
XML file is .. erm .. very painful at best because the iTunes APIs 
you'd usually want to use for this turn out to be unusable because 
AppleScript has an criticial bug / error in design in *exactly* that 
area (also confirmed by Apple engineers).

However, and this is the good news: RC2 will not only use the XML 
file for artists and albums, but also for playlists. And it's blazing 
fast. The only thing that will remain slow - due to the lack of any 
possibilities to work around AppleScript here - is access to remote/ 
shared playlists streamed from other computers running iTunes. 
There's more new features in the itunes library browsing in RC2, 
too .. but I won't spill those beans, yet ;-)

Best regards, 
Felix 

User

01.10.2007 23:27:30

 
 
This is too bad, Felix, but thanks for the info. I have found this to be the case for my setup. If I use iTunes' local library, RB is very fast. If I connect to my other Mac's iTunes, RB starts crawling, even after I navigate away from the iTunes browser. So I have to quit RB and start over.

What if I set up my iTunes library differently, such that the two Macs had write access to a network drive, each with their own local XML library file? I've read about how to sync those XML files with Applescript. The reason for doing this instead of iTunes share, is that then both have the permission to write to the library.

Just wondered if this would also allow RB to be faster. 

User

05.10.2007 11:00:16

Hi Rob,

the shared music library browser in version 1.7 of Remote Buddy is now 
about 30 times faster than in previous releases. You may want to give 
it a try before trying other things ;-)

(I don't think that it would be a good idea to have iTunes on two 
different computers access the same library at the same time, btw - 
it'd likely not work in the first place or even corrupt your database)

Best regards, 
Felix