What happens when you reach the complexity limitation of a piece of software?

I’ve talked about this a few times with colleagues and associates and for the past two years have constantly been running in to it with a piece of software I use on a daily basis. The software is iTunes, which works great if you’re like 99% of the people out there who have a few thousand music tracks and a couple of dozen music videos you’ve downloaded.

But what happens when you have over 80,000 music tracks ripped from your vast collection of CDs you own, more than 500 audio books, and weeks worth of music videos, literally thousands of music videos that you’ve ripped from your music DVDs and VHS tapes that you’ve acquired through the years?

iTunes was never built to handle a library like that. It takes forever to start-up and shutdown and becomes slow as molasses when scrolling through lists or attempting to do searches. And whilst Apple has made some performance improvements in the latest version to keep memory usage down, it still consumes upwards of a half-gigabyte to hold the index in memory.

When your entire audio and video life is digital, simple programs like iTunes are no longer able to keep up. Is there anything out there even remotely approaching the ability to make sense of that much personal content?

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