tag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:/discussions/problems/18776-newest-v3-so-many-beach-balls-so-many-force-quits-is-it-just-mebeaTunes: Discussion 2011-08-24T20:22:57Ztag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-21T23:57:29Z2011-08-21T23:57:30ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>I just updated to the very latest V3 that can be downloaded as
of today. (I won't launch the program to verify, it takes forever
to come up and I'm sure to have a bad experience).</p>
<p>One year old iMac Intel 2.4Ghz Duo, 10.6.8, 2GB RAM. Besides
beatunes, iTunes, Safari, Email and Terminal running (plenty of
free memory according to Activity Monitor). Later I tried quitting
Safari and iTunes to free up memory, no change, and as I said,
memory is not likely the problem.</p>
<p>About any thing I do causes a beach ball it seems. Even simple
searches can hang the tool. Especially, and repeatable, if I right
click a song and ask to tap out the BPM, up comes the BPM tapping
window OK, but if I click the play button to begin tapping, it's
beach ball and force quit. I'm afraid to click on any button, as it
frequently means the end of my session and a relaunch.</p>
<p>There are other things that seem to cause this, not as easy to
repeat, I'm tired now, and no more time for this. It is true that
this version launches slightly faster but not much, it still takes,
oh, 30 seconds to launch.</p>
<p>I have 8000 songs in my library, I feel that is not so very
many, but maybe that is too much.</p>
<p>The best solution for me is to go back to V2, if I can, because
my recollection is that I had far fewer problems. I will try that
another day.</p>
<p>Is it possible that "feature-creep", adding too many new
features and functions, has torpedoed the program's core
functions?<br>
(I feel that way about lots of stuff, especially Adobe products and
MS Office.)</p>
<p>The focus, IMHO, should be on fine tuning the existing, core
features. I was not even using more than 1/3 of the features
beatunes 2 had. I didn't need or want new features, to be
honest.</p>
<p>Sorry for my rant, I am just disappointed and frustrated.</p>
<p>I don't care about the money, I like to support independent S/W
developers. But I feel I can no longer do the BPM analyses, which
was at least 2/3 of the reason I like beatunes.</p>
<p>It is so hard waiting for software to react to a mouseclick,
whilst in Activity Monitor I see it using only 4% of the CPU and
80% of the CPU is free, and no obvious memory issues. What is it
doing?</p>
<p>So finally my question: how many others are having issues with
V3?</p>
<p>Thanks for reading,</p>
<p>R.Welti<br>
Seattle, WA<br>
USA</p></div>Russ Weltitag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-22T07:43:49Z2011-08-22T07:43:49ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>Hi Russ,</p>
<p>just to clarify, do you see multicolor beachballs or
shades-of-blue-beachballs?<br>
What are the 1/3 of the functions that you use the most?</p>
<p>Thanks,</p>
<p>-hendrik</p></div>hendriktag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-22T20:03:54Z2011-08-22T20:03:57ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>I've been using beaTunes 3.0.3 the past week and it's worked
fine. However, today I downloaded 3.0.4 and it keeps hanging up,
crashing, and giving me fatal errors.</p></div>copuftag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-22T23:48:29Z2011-08-22T23:48:29ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>Hi hendrik, </p>
<p>I will try again tonight when I am home, I am pretty sure it was
multi-colored, as in OS X (not Java). I know the two beach
balls you are talking about.</p>
<p>Thank you for answering, I was very frustrated at the time. I
realize how hard you must work on this, and you yourself probably
get frustrated much of the time.</p>
<p>I am certainly not a power user, not a DJ. Analyzing and fixing
the library meta-data (big one), including assigning BPM and "mood"
(color?) and key is the main usage I do, and of course creating
playlists. That was pretty much all I do with it. </p>
<p>It's still a great tool, and I respect your programming
skills.</p>
<p>Let's see if I'm the only person with issues, maybe more will be
revealed.</p>
<p>Best<br>
Russ</p>
<p>________________________________ From: hendrik
<a>tender+d8ceb3a99cbbf500f37cf113a2b939ed2ac5cb760@tenderapp.com</a><br>
To: <a href="mailto:rwelti@yahoo.com">rwelti@yahoo.com</a><br>
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2011 12:41 AM<br>
Subject: Re: Newest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits.
Is it just me? [Problems]</p></div>r weltitag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-23T06:49:26Z2011-08-23T06:49:26ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>Hi Russ,</p>
<p>if it's the multicolor ball, the OS is taking the time...
However, this is usually due to two different things:</p>
<ul>
<li>memory contention</li>
<li>disk IO</li>
</ul>
<p>Since you only have 2GB, I would assume it's memory contention.
Can you take a look at at Activity Monitor while beaTunes is
running. What does the overall System Memory tab (in the lower half
of the window) indicate? Any <em>green</em> (i.e. free) memory
left?</p>
<p><strong>If</strong> that's the case, please try the following in
order to lower beaTunes' memory consumption a little:</p>
<ul>
<li>Install the latest version (3.0.4)</li>
<li>Make sure, beaTunes is not running</li>
<li>CTRL-Click on beaTunes3 in Finder</li>
<li>Choose "Show Package Contents"</li>
<li>in the new Finder window, go to <code>Contents</code></li>
<li>Open <code>Info.plist</code> in TextEdit</li>
<li>Find the line
<code><key>VMOptions</key></code></li>
<li>Edit the string underneath so that it says <code>-Xms92m
-Xmx256m -ea -Xloggc:gc.log -XX:+PrintGCDetails
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=256m</code></li>
<li>Save the file</li>
<li>Open <code>Info.plist.template</code> in TextEdit</li>
<li>Find the line
<code><key>VMOptions</key></code></li>
<li>Also edit the string underneath so that it says <code>-Xms92m
-Xmx256m -ea -Xloggc:gc.log -XX:+PrintGCDetails
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=256m</code></li>
<li>Save the file</li>
<li>Now start beaTunes3</li>
<li>Go to Preferences -> Analysis and make sure you have a
maximum of <em>.2</em> parallel analysis tasks. If you don't,
change it and restart beaTunes</li>
</ul>
<p>Note that , these new settings will be lost which each beaTunes
update.<br>
This only makes sense with relatively small libraries (~10,000
songs) on system with a relatively low amount of memory.</p>
<p>You also should turn off "Automatic playlist export" (in the
general preferences) and avoid the <em>missing artwork</em>
inspection as well as <em>replay gain</em> analysis as they are
either slow or use a lot of memory.</p>
<p>Hope this helps a little,</p>
<p>Thanks,</p>
<p>-hendrik</p></div>hendriktag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-23T15:27:39Z2011-08-23T15:27:39ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>Hi hendrik,</p>
<p>OK.</p>
<p>Launched it again, took 70 seconds until main window came
up. (With Preview, Mail, iTunes, Skitch and Software Update
already running, and Activity Monitor showed 160MB free mem and 402
inactive MB).</p>
<p>Then it was blue-white beachball for 60 seconds of
"Synchronizing with music library" ...</p>
<p>Then I right mouse a song and say Tap Beat.</p>
<p>Dialog comes up with slight delay and blue-white ball for say 4
secs.</p>
<p>If I patiently wait for the blue-white ball to stop, plus
another sec or two, I was able to hit the play button and it
played!<br>
But if I hit the play button during the blue-white, or too soon
after it stops, I hang beatunes with the OS X multi-colored
beachball.</p>
<p>I do realize that issuing commands during the blue-white ball is
not advisable. I believe my experience before, last time that is,
was that I had waited for the blue-white to stop. I normally
would not expect things to work if I rush ahead during the
blue-white.</p>
<p>Note I did not download today's newest version.</p>
<p>I hope this info helps in some way!</p>
<p>Best regards<br>
Russ</p>
<p>________________________________ From: hendrik
<a>tender+d8ceb3a99cbbf500f37cf113a2b939ed2ac5cb760@tenderapp.com</a><br>
To: <a href="mailto:rwelti@yahoo.com">rwelti@yahoo.com</a><br>
Sent: Monday, August 22, 2011 12:41 AM<br>
Subject: Re: Newest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits.
Is it just me? [Problems]</p></div>r weltitag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-23T16:01:57Z2011-08-23T16:01:57ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>I'm currently away from my main computer - but 160mb of free
memory is definitely not enough..</p>
<p>Am 23.08.2011 um 17:25 schrieb "r welti"
<a>tender+d8ceb3a99cbbf500f37cf113a2b939ed2ac5cb760@tenderapp.com</a>:</p></div>hendriktag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-23T17:52:47Z2011-08-23T17:52:47ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>Thanks for the fast response, hendrik.</p>
<p>I'll investigate memory as you suggest when I get home.</p>
<p>I think 2GB RAM is more "typical" than "relatively little" for
an iMac in the current, real world. I mean if your iMac is a year
or more old then 2GB might be typical, right? something like that.
...new ones come with 4GB I see. How nice. </p>
<p>Anyway I fully appreciate the memory issues for a complex
program. I will experiment more. As I said in original
email, I did run it with almost all other apps closed already once,
but I did not measure RAM usage.</p>
<p>Thanks for your active involvement, it is fun to work with you.
I am committed to beatunes.</p>
<p>Russ</p></div>r weltitag:help.beatunes.com,2009-07-24:Comment/94606812011-08-24T20:22:54Z2011-08-24T20:22:54ZNewest V3: So many beach balls, so many force quits. Is it just me?<div><p>Here's the thing with memory and beaTunes:</p>
<ul>
<li>it may not <em>need</em> all the memory it's granted in the
settings I described above.</li>
<li>however, it <em>will</em> use the memory once it's granted</li>
<li>it will fail, if it ever needs more.</li>
</ul>
<p>So to lower demand even more, you could also go down to:</p>
<p><code>-Xms92m -Xmx256m -ea -Xloggc:gc.log -XX:+PrintGCDetails
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=128m</code></p>
<p>But at some point, things will simply not improve anymore and
you will see Java OutOfMemory errors. That's a situation you want
to avoid, as it could potentially corrupt the internal beaTunes
database.</p>
<p>-hendrik</p></div>hendrik