How to speed up iTunes (overall)?

I'm on a mac, running the newest version of iTunes. It's gotten so slow that it's not even worth taking the time to use it. It will take several minutes to load up, and then several more before I can even play a song. The response from the software is very sluggish.

My itunes library is very large (close to 400GBs) and located on an external hard drive.

What can I do to speed up itunes? Do I need to reduce the size of my library? Should I try to make room to move it back over to my computer, rather than the external? (USB 2.0) Is there an alternative to iTunes that works more efficiently, but can still work with my other apple products? (iphone, ipad, etc?) Thanks.

Your library is the culprit. Doesn't matter whether its on an external or internal drive, it's so massive, it takes iTunes forever to go through it. Pare it down to a manageable level. You don't need to delete anything, just put what you currently want to listen to or use in the active iTunes library and put everything else into a separate folder.

It won't matter what you use, 400 gb will slow down every program. It's simply too large.

Which "on a mac" is it?

For an iMac, buy an external enclosure for the drive that has Firewire 800 connection. It is much faster than USB.

"Doesn't matter whether its on an external or internal drive"
Sure it does. Too bad PC geeks don't pay much attention to bus speed. USB 2.0 is S*L*O*WWW. Why do you think we now have USB 3.0? Firewire is the best choice, because it is full-duplex (USB 2.0 is half-duplex) and is not affected by the processor activity. When people quote the "specs" of USB, they fail to test it in real-life, where it fails to match Firewire in every instance.

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