Manually Changing the beaTunes Memory Configuration on OS X

If you repeatedly run into OutOfMemoryErrors, and other remedies don't help, you might want to manually change beaTunes' memory configuration.

To do so, you have to edit two files with a simple text editor like TextEdit.

But before you do anything else, make sure you have shut down beaTunes.

Both files are located in the beaTunes3 application bundle. To get to them, CTRL-click (or right-click) on the beaTunes3 application in Finder and select Show Package Contents. This will open a new Finder window with the contents of the application bundle. In this window open the Contents folder.

The Contents folder contains two files. One named Info.plist, another named Info.plist.template.

1. Open Info.plist with TextEdit (e.g. through CTRL-click, Open With).
2. Find the line containing <key>VMOptions</key>
3. In the next line, find the parameter that starts with -Xmx
4. This parameter specifies the maximum heap size of the Java beaTunes3 process. By changing this parameter you can grant more or less memory to beaTunes. Typically this parameter is less than 1000m, meaning less than 1000 megabytes.
5. Change the -Xmx parameter to a higher value, e.g. to -Xmx1500m
6. Save the file

To make the change permanent, you need to also edit the second file, i.e. Info.plist.template:

1. Open Info.plist.template with TextEdit.
2. Find the line containing <key>VMOptions</key>
3. In the next line, find the parameter -Xmx${vm.memory.heap.max}
4. Replace the whole expression with the same parameter you used in Info.plist, e.g. -Xmx1500m.
5. Save the file

One thing to keep in mind when changing the -Xmx parameter is, that you cannot assign more memory to beaTunes than your system has to offer. E.g. granting beaTunes a value of 4000m does not make any sense on a system with only 2GB of RAM.

After you saved both files, start using beaTunes with the changed settings.

For Windows, please see here