iTunes freezing on CD imports

[karavite]

Hello, I searched on this and found no similar postings.

I have been importing many of my CDs into iTunes as 44.1 16 bit stereo wav files and recently iTunes just stops in the middle of importing various tracks - often with 1 or 2 seconds left on the "Time remaining" on the import status. It just hangs. At first I thought is was something with the CDs. but it happens on almost every CD I try. I have a DP 1 GHz with 1 GB of RAM a super drive and it is running 10.3.2 and iTunes 4.2 (72) and I have done the following:

1. I reparied permissions just for the heck of it - no go.
2. Plenty of restarts - same problem.
3. Plenty of space on the drive - 40 GB free.

Any ideas please? Perhaps a "corrupt" iTunes library file of some sort?

Note, to import I was using the Advanced Menu - Convert selection to Wav to import the CDs and was having this problem, but I just tried the old upper right Import button instead it does the same thing. Usually at about the 12th or 13th track on a CD.

 

[Anthony]

Perhaps its a hardware (CD drive) problem? Can you hear your CD-ROM still spinning even after iTunes freezes? Can you listen to the track where the freeze occurs without problems? I'm just thinking maybe when the laser in your drive gets out near the outer edge of the disc its having trouble reading and causing iTunes to freeze as a result...

As a side thought you might want to try the program LameBrain (search Versiontracker) to rip... it uses the lame encoding engine which is as high (if not higher) quality sounding as the iTunes encoder, its not too picky if your discs are scratched, gives you a lot more flexibility in configuring encoding options.. and its also free. Even if you'd still prefer iTunes you might want to give it a shot to rule out the possibility that there is something wrong with your drive.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Since you're using a lossless format like .WAV, do you have any objections to using .AIFF?

If you don't, it would be easy as pie to pop in a CD, let it query the CDDB archive to get track names, then just drag-and-drop them off of the CD onto the hard drive using the Finder. Voilá! Lossless AIFF files!

 

[karavite]

Thanks Anthony and Eldio - you gave me this advice on AIFF on another thread, but I thought WAV was also lossless - wait, you said that! Any way, I tried exactly what you suggested on my own and guess what - the tracks that are freezing up in iTunes are also freezing up via this method. They can't be read. I actually think I have scratched up CDs and just had the luck of trying a few scratched disks in a row. I'm going to try another external CD drive I have around here and/or my handy CD resurfacing kit too. So, thanks to both of you, I think I have this rather silly situation figured out (Anthony's mentioning scratches got me thinking). Still, it would be nice if iTunes could have told me it was having trouble reading the file! Just freezing is not the best way to communicate with the old user!

P.S. I can PLAY these troublesome tracks from the CD and not hear any obvious clicks or skips, but I think playing and reading into memory are two different animals in terms of how the computer can handle errors - no?

 

[Anthony]

P.S. I can PLAY these troublesome tracks from the CD and not hear any obvious clicks or skips, but I think playing and reading into memory are two different animals in terms of how the computer can handle errors - no?

Shouldn't be different... Macintosh computers pull the audio data over the IDE interface the same way they rip the data.. (PCs differ in that most of them play back the audio through an analog interface but read the data differently.) So if you can play them in theory you should be able to rip them... but who knows. I just discovered a new option in iTunes thats apparently new in 4.2.. the "Use error correction" option under the Importing preferences. I believe it slows the CD reading down a bit and performs jitter correction and it may help you out. (Or maybe you have it on and it seems to hang because its trying to correct an error it can't recover from.) Either way, try it the other way

 

[karavite]

Hey Anthony - thanks! I think I gave a brief thought to error correction when I was looking at some of these scratched up CDs, but now with your much more informed information I think you might be interested to know I had the error correction on the whole time! I can't tell you why I had it on, but I tried it with it off and the same thing happened.

Now for the bad news - but not really. I plugged in my old USB Iomega 4x CD burner drive, put in the same CD and used iTunes to import that troublesome track successfully! Now I'm thinking, oh man, I have a bad super drive! So, just for kicks I try copying/pasting the same file using the Finder using the Iomega drive but it locks up too. I try importing into iTunes with the Superdrive and it hangs again. Weird huh?

Here is the interesting part, and I have to ask forgiveness. When I said I could play the CD and not hear any obvious pops, I sort of lied. I had listened to this track on my home CD player and this was true, but when I listened to it from the superdrive, I jumped around and did not listen to the whole track in one sitting. Now, when I listen to the entire track on either of the computer's CD drives, there ARE some nasty and obvious pops for a 5 second stretch in the song. These same pops are in the successful iTunes import too. Interestingly my home CD player is a nearly $800 Rotel CD player and it somehow just handles the scratches - who says you can't pay for quality (though I thought all these things had the same basic laser mechanism under the hood?). I guess it would be interesting to understand why the Iomega drive was somehow less fussy with the import than the super drive, but I think we can successfully rule out bad drives and rule in a scratched up disk and my sloppy trouble shooting skills/lack of insightful deductive/inductive reasoning...!

P.S. Error correction back on with the Iomega and it still reads the track, but does not fix the pops in the track. I didn't expect it to though.

So, I'm sorry for essentially wasting the time of people here, but it might be useful to some people who are having similar issues. In the mean time, I will try out my handy dandy CD/DVD resurfacing tool (can get them at Circuit City for $30) - it has come through in the past and I'm not giving up quite yet! I'll let you know.

The big lesson here is something I almost always do, but once again, I must remind myself to ALWAYS take good care of your CDs!

 

[Anthony]

No problem I went through all this stuff myself about a week ago trying to rescue a badly scratched disc. Also turned out I used a technics cd player from 1986 and it played through the disc flawlessly so I ended up sampling it and then burning myself a new scratch-free copy.

As for your superdrive being more picky, thats normal. I'm not *exactly* sure how it works but it probably has two (or maybe more) different lasers, and they have to read/write all sorts of different media formats with different beam intensities and focus etc. Then take into account that when the disc is spinning faster any imperfections on the disc makes it harder for the laser to "track" (think almost like a needle on a turntable..if you had a crooked groove it might pop out.. the laser tries to find its spot again and might be what is causing the hang.) So its a jack of all trades and a master of none..

 

[karavite]

Thanks again Anthony. I have no ill will to my superdrive - with all it does, it is, well... Super! Still, it would be nice if iTunes could simply say, "Hey bucko, your CD is hosed."

By the way, what did you use to sample your CD? I imagine you have some music recording gear. Would a sound card with an optical in allow me to used an optical/digital out from my CD player in order to sample a CD? I'm just looking for any excuse to get an optical audio in and out for my G4 DP 1 GHz!

 

[Anthony]

I sampled with a Griffin iMic (http://www.griffintechnology.com/) into Sound Studio (its on Versiontracker) with my iBook because I was too lazy to bring the CD player closer to my Powermac. Definitely not an audiophile's dream but it does the trick. There seems to be a real lacking in the "middle-end" for audio equipment on the Mac, its either the cheap stuff like Griffin's iMic and Powerwave or expensive stuff like a $400 M-Box. For this particular CD it really didn't matter, it was no master piece of audio engineering anyway and the original still works for listening to in the house on my CD player, I just wanted a copy that would play in the car without skipping. If you can find some kind of sound card or external device with an optical input you can make near-perfect copies of CDs by sampling them that way. I think the high-end Creative cards work on Macs (the Extigy) but aren't fully supported... I'm pretty sure they have optical on them. I know Edirol makes a USB audio capture interface with optical in/out and a whole slew of other inputs and features but again its over $400, whereas the iMic was $39.95 (and is small enough to carry around with my iBook)