When I first started to use iTunes, it very much played well with other software applications running. Then, a few versions later, the playback began to suffer with iTunes running in any way other than on its own. A solution that I have is to fire up the Windows Task Manager, go to the Processes tab and find iTunes.exe in the list. The next thing is to right-click on this, select the Set Priority and change the setting to Above Normal. Windows will warn you about what you are doing but it usually doesn’t cause any other problem. Yes, it sounds a bit extreme but it always solves the playback problem.

So long as iTunes is merely playing music, all is well. However, when it starts ripping CD’s, it’s a wholly different matter. That is a CPU intensive operation and setting the process priority to Low is a very good idea. I recently got caught out by a default setting of ripping any music CD inserted into the PC and, at Above Normal priority, the PC got locked up. Eventually, I got things back under control and lowered the priority. Needless to say, iTunes will just list the contents of an inserted CD from now on. I have learnt my lesson; keeping the command line open to get at command line process tools would be a very good idea for the future, especially as I know where to find these on the web.

In an earlier post, I wondered about command line management of Windows processes. Well, I have since located the sort of tools that I was after as part of the Windows Sysinternals toolkit. It began as an independent endeavour and continued as such until Microsoft acquired them in 2006. You can find out more about the process utilities here and the whole Sysinternals suite can be downloaded in a single package.

Here are a few UNIX commands that I have recently encountered that help with process management and are particularly useful when jobs are running in the background. Here they are:

nohup

It’s short for no hangup and stops termination a job when a user logs off. Another result is that all console messages being directed to a file called nohup.out in the directory current to the job being run, or in the user’s home directory where write access to the current working directory is unavailable.

ps

This returns a list of processes, their ID’s and their statuses. By default this is for your own processes but you can look beyond this with the myriad of options that can be passed. For instance, the-U switch allows you to look at job for other users while the -f one shows more information than the standard call and this even includes the commands submitted to start the ongoing processes.

kill

The name says it all and it’s far quicker than the rigmarole that you have to endure with the Windows task manager; I wonder if there is a command line approach to process termination on Windows.