I have a fairly large iTunes (v10.6) library of music (425 gigabytes) running on a Windows 7 Professional, 64 bit, i7 Quad Core with 8 Gigabytes of memory, Dell computer. My internal network is running over a WNDR4000 wireless N router with WPA2 encryption. I have recently installed the Apple remote App to my iPhone 4s running iOS 5.1. In trying to control the playing of music within iTunes with the remote app I have experienced less than adequate results. The app seems to become "stuck" for lack of a better term trying to switch to different tracks within iTunes. Eventually it will switch to a selected track after 3+ minutes. I have turned off encryption as an experiment to see if this will allow the app to switch to a selected track more rapidly (i.e. within seconds) with no success. The wireless router is running latest firmware. I am highly skeptical of this issue being a result of my wireless infrastructure and am more prone to see this as a result of the size of my iTunes library. I ran an additional test on my late 2011 Mac Book Pro (i7,Lion,8GB Ram, SSD) with a much smaller iTunes (v10.6) library (less than 2 gigabytes) over same wireless infrastructure with WPA2 encryption enabled and play back from app on iPhone was as would be expected, music selection from app was near instantaneous. My question is as follows:
Has anyone experienced a similar issue when trying to use the app on an iPhone in conjunction with a large iTunes library running on a Windows 7 64 bit PC? If so was any workaround isolated?
I have searched Google and the Apple forums but was unable to find any reference to a similar instance.
Best Answer
Doesn't surprise me at all. An iPhone doesn't have anywhere near enough memory to work with that much data unless the developer puts a huge amount of effort into making it work, and I can't see Apple doing so when few people have a database that big.
Most likely it can only store info about a small subsection of your library on the phone, and whenever it needs to access data from a song it doesn't have, it has to go back to the server. I could see that maxing out a fibre channel network's bandwidth, let alone wireless.
About all you can do is send an email to apple's support team and ask them to fix it in some future update. If enough people complain, they will.
Have you tried working with playlists that only expose small sections of your library?