Apple just announced a whole slew of new products, include a new iTunes which includes a feature I’ve been drooling over ever since I first saw it on a Mac: CoverFlow. For those who haven’t seen it, CoverFlow is a very pretty way of displaying all your digital music by album by animating it as a long stack of album covers:
You can scroll through them with a nice animated effect, all very pretty. Recently, Apple bought CoverFlow, and just today, re-released it in iTunes 7.
Wanting this super-cool (but ultimately useless) technology, I downloaded and installed iTunes 7. As soon as it was finished installing, I opened it up and asked it to download every piece of album art it could get its hands on.
I waited in anticipation, scrolling back and forth through the blank album covers. Finally, it finished. I happily scrolled back and forth a couple times, content with my new acquisition, and found an album to listen to as I went back to doing real work.
A while later I noticed my computer was a bit sluggish, so I glanced at my performance stats. Hmmm…thats odd, memory use is a bit high. Who’s being greedy? Yup, iTunes was chewing up 200 megs of memory. “Ah!”, I thought, “it must still have all those album covers in memory from downloading them, I’ll just restart it.” Exit, Restart iTunes. Ok, memory use back to normal.
I then decided to check out the scrolling again, ’cause, well, why not? I went to the beginning, and scrolled all the way to the end. Wheee! Hmm, memory use is going up again. Going way up. Let’s see how much:
Yikes! 552 megabytes! And it wasn’t even playing music. And it was minimized. To the system tray. And less than 200 of my albums actually have cover art.
Apparently, Apple is caching every single image in memory, just in case I decide to scroll all the way back to the other end, despite the fact that I can do the first scroll with no performance problems.
Ok, what if I switch out of CoverFlow mode? Down to 307 mb. Great. They’re caching, and they’re not freeing them, even when there is no possible way for me to view them. Even if I minimize it again, so that there is absolutely no possible way for me to directly access the cover art, the 300+ megs remain in memory. The only way to clear it out is to restart iTunes.
Now, on my machine here it’s not a huge deal, I have 2 gigs of ram to play with, and while this takes up more than I’d like, I can live with it. But any lower, and iTunes would be crippling my machine, pushing everything, including itself, out into virtual memory.
The verdict: Hold off on using CoverFlow until they fix this in what I can only imagine is the soon-to-be-released version 7.01.
Update: In case it was not clear, this is running on Windows XP Pro SP2 with 2GB of RAM.
Is anybody else getting this message?iTunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer
Im on teh mac and can’t say i’m seeing this.
I’m seeing this! Upon load it took 60Megs of RAM which is about what iTunes 6 took. Then I switched to the album cover scrolling view and started sliding across. I have a few hundred albums. By the end iTunes took 400Megs of RAM. When I switched back to grid view it dropped to 250Megs. This is terrible! This is on a 1.5Gig XP system.
I am seeing the same message as Stranger Zero. No CoverFLow for me on my P4 2.67ghz running Win XP Home SP2 with 1.28gb RAM and 64mb SiS IGP. Arg!
This pisses me off. Cover Flow worked like a dream when it was standalone. What did Apple do to it??
It’s not just the cover flow that leaks it’s album art in general. I watched my memory use stay stable as I scrolled through my library in text mode. Switching to album art mode caused it to continuously rise. This is a serious problem for someone with a large collection who likes to leave iTunes open all for weeks at a time.
There’s also some kind of leak in the files themselves. Adding artwork increases the size of the file (of course) and removing artwork doesn’t always reduce it to the initial size.
It will get fixed. The issue for those of us with lower speed machines and lower memory is that the software completely crashes for this reason when you switch to view the TV or Movie directory in the Store. In effect, I cannot view those two areas – which means I cannot buy anything – which means that Apple isn’t making money. They’re not going to fix something that won’t benefit them – money is a good motivator to see a quick fix coming.
So that would explain the sluggishness to my 1st gen MacMini with 512mb ram.
are you charged at all for downloading the album art, or is it free?
No, the album art is free.
if its free, why do they want you to sign up and give them your credit card number?
no credit card required for downloading album art. i think they might ask for it, but you can just cancel or say ‘no i dont want to give you my credit card number’ or something like that
For real? I didn’t get the Coverfloe parts working, because I don’t have a credit card, so I DL’d the separate (or stand-alone) version of Coverflow. Works great on my mini.
Itunes7 is crashing if you click on TV shows.Displaying the following message before the crash.itunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer
TONS of problems since installing iTunes 7 on my XP pc (2 gig memory, 40 gig hard drive, 120 gig music drive). Took FOREVER for it to scan for ‘gapless playback’–a feature that SHOULD be optional but isn’t. Then, it did the same to my iPod, which took another hour or so. All in all, just to transfer one file takes almost a minute. Using ANAPOD takes a few seconds. Don’t use iTunes to transfer songs to the iPod–ANAPOD is the king. SUPER-fast and absolutely no memory leaks/problems. I love the way iTunes 7 looks, but it is absolutely unusable in it’s current state, other than to update iPod firmware. What a shame. All that, and it still won’t monitor music folders! CRAP!
2 versions later (7.0.2) .. memory leak continues .. what a joke
Yeah…I think I might just remove all the cover art. It’s not pretty or smooth enough to justify the memory it takes up.
when i try to open up the cover flow it says that itunes is unable to browse album cover on my computer, but yet almost all my music has artwork. can somebody help me out?
What I don’t get, this leak has been known for some months now, why hasn’t Apple fixed this?
I am running an iMac G5 and getting itunes is unable to browse album covers on this computer. It happened because my girlfriend updated to itunes. 7.3?
Hmm…I’m not sure about the Macs, and I don’t have one to test it on. Anyone know?
still broken in version 8!