iPod coverart sluggishness

For those of you who have an iPod with a few thousand songs, you may have noticed that it can be sluggish to play songs and especially when playing the next song. This had been happening to me for a little while now, and to be honest I’ve really been to lazy to find out why, although I suspected the coverart. Songs with images took up to a few seconds to load, causing the gui to freeze totally (although music playback was uninterrupted). I knew something was totally wrong because the hard disc activity increased and battery drained quickly. My suspicion was that the libgpod library wrote covers to the database in an incorrect manner.

Yesterday I was playing around on iTunes for some (competitor) research, and decided it was probably a good idea to update the iPod firmware. It never came to mind that the coverart problem was simply an inefficient art grabber within the iPod software. Lo and behold, updating to version 1.2.1 seems to have cured the sluggishness and the device is as responsive as it was when there was no artwork loaded.