15 replies to this topic

[DennisD]

I've always thought iTunes was the best program you can use if you have an iPod, as it does what it does really well.

But it's always pissed me off big time that it has to be so damned big. I decided tonight to find out why, and I got the surprise of my life.

My iTunes folder, after updating to the latest version today stood at over 89mb, and it took all of 30 seconds to find out why it's so big, and how to chop it down to just over 27mb.

Go into these 3 folders in iTunes "Program Files" folder and strip out nothing else but useless language folders.



Make sure you just remove language folders, ".lproj" which you don't need, leaving 1 folder and any other files. Make sure you don't remove the other files.

The Quicktime Program Files folder also contains a lot of the same unnecessary ".lproj" language folders. Removing these took about 25mb off Quicktime. Not a lot, but added to the iTunes rubbish it's a good saving.

I'm sure iTunes now launches quicker, but that may be my imagination, but I've been running it all night, and removing these files has no effect at all on its function.

Of course, if you do this, take your time, and you can always reinstall it if you mess up.

[ishan_rulz]

Thanks!

[Andavari]

iTunes is the sole reason I've never bought an iPod! That and iTunes goes through the very long chore of setting the volume levels of my music which is huge so it takes many hours, if it would only read the ReplayGain values like Foobar2000.

You could probably make your own personal CCleaner winapp2.ini cleaner for those lang files. I've always been removing unneeded lang files from programs for years, and it's somewhat surprising when some programs by themselves are relatively small and lang files are bigger than the actual program.

[ishan_rulz]

I like iTunes, it's simple and organized. It doesn't hurt the eye. And I'm used to it.

[DennisD]

My C: drive has just reached the point where I don't have enough free space to defrag properly, so I started looking for stuff to remove.

Besides the big saving with iTunes and Quicktime, you can get rid of another 40mb+ by uninstalling the Apple "Mobile Device Support". Only needed if you have something like an iPhone.

Apart from the unnecessary size of these installs, you can also stop just about every service iTunes and Quicktime run.

My daughters Ipod Nano works and syncs fine with nothing else but the "iPod Service" enabled, but set at Manual. The useless "Bonjour" service is totally disabled, and there's nothing running related to Quicktime.

It's actually nice that you can do all this streamlining, and still have iTunes work as it should.

[Andavari]

ishan_rulz, on Aug 22 2009, 06:35 AM, said:

I like iTunes, it's simple and organized. It doesn't hurt the eye. And I'm used to it.

It would be so much better if it were to support more formats. Sure for the masses that think everything is MP3 it will work fine however there's other formats out there like Ogg, and FLAC that it doesn't support, especially FLAC is my main gripe with it!

[1984]

I've got an iphone and an ipod touch and there was definately a learning curve with it. but now that im used to it, i actually quite like it. i agree with andavaris post about different format. it seems apple is just missing a few features in their software/devices to make them really perfect.

[mikeb]

DennisD, on Aug 21 2009, 04:28 PM, said:

I've always thought iTunes was the best program you can use if you have an iPod, as it does what it does really well.

I absolutely hate it. I think it can be improved. I suppose the store part is alright but as far as file management I think it stinks. I haven't searched out an alternative though. If tagging wise it did what mp3tag does I'd be a happy man.

For starters if you can tell me how to get rid of songs showing up in Itunes that aren't my drive anymore but are on my ipod that would be nice.

How'd you disable Bonjour? I think that Bonjour makes my system buggy.

[DennisD]

I looked around for alternatives as it isn't my favourite program either, but it's for my daughters iPod, and I really couldn't find anything that worked better.

I agree it isn't good as a file handler, and I find the interface sluggish at times, but it does what it does with an iPod better than anything else out there.

And I've looked at Winamp and Windows Media Player plugins etc, but iTunes does it better.

And now it's down to 27mb I don't hate it as much.

Just disable the Bonjour Service in Windows Services. "Start\Run\ Enter "Services.msc" (no quotes), right click Bonjour and select "disable".

You probably know how to do that, but just in case you don't.

You'll get a popup from iTunes about it being disabled, but that only happens once. And if you install a new version of iTunes over the old one, it stays disabled, which surprised me.

Quote

For starters if you can tell me how to get rid of songs showing up in Itunes that aren't my drive anymore but are on my ipod that would be nice.

I'll have a look at this, and I'm assuming you want them off your iPod if you've taken them off your drive?

[Andavari]

Search on SourceForge.net for iTunes alternatives and you'll find them. Note that you'll have to make sure whatever alternative you use actually works with your iPod.

[mikeb]

DennisD, on Aug 22 2009, 02:58 PM, said:

I'll have a look at this, and I'm assuming you want them off your iPod if you've taken them off your drive?

I had a situation a while back where room on my drive was low and so I saved a few dvd's full of music and when I got my Ipod I would load 1 music dvd onto my drive then load my ipod....delete that batch off my drive...load another...save to ipod....etc. I think what happens is the Ipod would look for those files on the drive and they're not there. They were orphaned I guess. I never saw how to stop that. It was quite annoying. I can't say I like to spend time with Itunes , so I don't know if there's a way to get the songs off the Ipod back onto the drive, or a way to index so itunes knows it's not an error.

[mikeb]

Andavari, on Aug 22 2009, 04:44 PM, said:

Search on SourceForge.net for iTunes alternatives and you'll find them. Note that you'll have to make sure whatever alternative you use actually works with your iPod.

Wow! I just did a quick search and there's quite a few things up there. Thanks for the heads up on that!

[ishan_rulz]

Andavari, on Aug 22 2009, 11:26 PM, said:

It would be so much better if it were to support more formats. Sure for the masses that think everything is MP3 it will work fine however there's other formats out there like Ogg, and FLAC that it doesn't support, especially FLAC is my main gripe with it!

Yes yes, I use mainly MP3. I have very less of the other formats, and for that I use something like VLC. Which isn't much of an audio player, but it works

[DennisD]

mikeb, on Aug 23 2009, 03:35 AM, said:

I had a situation a while back where room on my drive was low and so I saved a few dvd's full of music and when I got my Ipod I would load 1 music dvd onto my drive then load my ipod....delete that batch off my drive...load another...save to ipod....etc. I think what happens is the Ipod would look for those files on the drive and they're not there. They were orphaned I guess. I never saw how to stop that. It was quite annoying. I can't say I like to spend time with Itunes , so I don't know if there's a way to get the songs off the Ipod back onto the drive, or a way to index so itunes knows it's not an error.

Wow, I'm surprised you got it to work at all like that, and I'm not surprised your iPod doesn't know what day of the week it is.

There is a way to get songs off an iPod. I used a nifty freeware program to do just that with my daughters iPod.

She screwed up her library, lost some albums she couldn't quickly replace, and didn't want to lose the same albums off her iPod. It transferred the albums off her iPod into iTunes in the correct format.

Getting music transferred backwards from iPod to iTunes is something Apple make as difficult as possible to prevent music sharing.

Trouble is I didn't keep the program, and I can't even remember it's name, but I'll see if I can find it again.

On the subject of alternatives, I've tried a lot of them, and none of them came close to iTunes when you use it properly. I add that bit after reading of your adventurous "unconventional" method of adding tunes to your iPod above.

If you delve into the iTunes settings, you can have your music spread all over the place, as long as each album remains in that particular place. If it's moved or removed, and iTunes can't find it, then it removes it from it's album list, and the iPod.

To avoid that happening you would need use the "Consolidate Library" button in the iTunes File menu. That button tells iTunes to make a copy of every album from all the different locations, and place it in it's default library, which is C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\My Music\iTunes

Then you can safely move or remove those albums from wherever they are.

I'll see if I can find that program for you.

[DennisD]

Have any of you iTunes using Vista Owners out there tried stripping out all the useless language folders?

Would appreciate some input on this.

Thanks.

[Andavari]

DennisD, on Aug 23 2009, 02:01 PM, said:

If it's moved or removed, and iTunes can't find it, then it removes it from it's album list, and the iPod.

That would be enough to be completely annoying in itself. It's somewhat retarded actually. I'll never buy an iPod!