I’m almost at my wit’s end with iTunes. Syncing my iPod for the first time this week (with just music and pictures) took all day (~8 hours.) Totally unacceptable. I don’t believe this is problem is specific to Vista, because XP was slow as well for me; it just wasn’t this slow.

My installation of Vista has the latest Intel chipset drivers, ensuring my hard drive is reading/writing as fast as possible, so that’s not the problem. Check out my Vista experience rating to confirm this… 5.7 out of 6 for hard disk speed:

Furthermore, none of the other “heavy” applications I run have experienced a slowdown in going from XP to Vista. In fact, Photoshop seems to be running faster, as do my video games (Oblivion’s level transitions are super fast now!)

Looking around the web for iTunes+slow posts, I came up with this forum post from someone experiencing very-slow network share access under iTunes. Funny enough, I had this exact problem a year or so ago, and ended up ditching my network audio drive, instead copying all the files to my local hard drive. When that still wasn’t speedy enough, I reconfigured my hard drives into RAID0, with very little improvement in speed.

Scott Hanselman also recently wrote a post about iTunes 7 and slowness. He comments more on the UI aspect of iTunes sucking more under Windows/Vista, and I have to agree. Re-sizing the iTunes window is terribly slow, as is the “filtering on the fly” of search results, etc. — in general, iTunes’s speed is a joke.

So what can Apple do to speed things up?

• Implement a real database back-end that will keep track of your files, metadata and thumbnails, making searches more “realtime”.
• Utilize the new Windows Presentation Framework (it’s what gives Vista its flashy interfaces) to make the interface. WPF will even work on XP (via .NET 3.0) so I don’t know why Apple is holding out on this one. Resizing delays, window redraws, etc. would become a thing of the past.
• Optimize the code for Windows. I have a hard time believing that Apple is doing all they can to squeeze performance out of Windows. This might be off-topic a bit, but even though my machine exceeds the minimum requirements put forth by Apple, my machine still cannot play 1080p Quicktime7 video without “pausing” every couple of seconds, yet my machine can handle 1080p WMV-HD just fine. Something is wrong with that picture.

So clearly, iTunes is doing something wrong here and Apple needs to address it. Apple has a feedback form for Vista and Quicktime, so if you’re having problems too, you should fill it out, cross your fingers, and hope your e-mail actually goes to someone who gives a darn.