CD ripping slow on 2012 iMac i7 with SuperDrive

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Seems to be taking longer than it should based on what? Optical media is pretty slow.

 

I've found my Mac's SuperDrives to be pretty picky with smudged or otherwise scratched cd's or unbalanced (cdr's with glued labels for instance). Also most Superdrives have something called Silent Play technology if i remember correctly. Which makes them slow... but silent and not optimal for ripping. Sometimes there's a (non official!) firmware to switch that off.

I don't think you can do anything about it other than make 100% sure you have cleaned your CD's in the best possible way.

 

My USB Superdrive is the same with regards to speeds on my late 2012 iMac.

If you look at the specs for the various speeds the Superdrive can do, reading, writing, from what I've seen on other portable CD/DVD drives (that contain a laptop type drive in them, like the Superdrive has) is that they all have exactly the same speeds.

I looked into this when I was purchasing my iMac and was looking for a CD/DVD drive for it.

In the end I went for the Superdrive because it only had one 1 USB plug to power it, it was a perfect match for the iMac's design, it fits perfectly on the foot of the iMac's stand, and I prefer the slot loading design rather than the draw type most CD/DVD drives have on them.

It's only when you get the much larger 5.25 inch CD/DVD drive that speeds are higher. When I had my Windows PC (which had an internal 5.25 inch CD/DVD drive) CD ripping in iTunes was faster.

But I don't rip a lot of CD's with iTunes, I tend to have the MP3's on my iMac. So for the rare occasion I rip a CD, the Superdrive is more than fast enough for me

 

Same here. Ripping CDs using an external SuperDrive on a Mini takes longer than on a comparable CD drive on a Windows notebook.

It's not a big deal, though, as it's a background task. What really upsets me is that the process is unreliable and I have to clean up the iTunes database afterwards, as iTunes for whatever reason tends to split CDs into several albums, based on the song interpreters.

 

Part of the ripping speed depends on the quality of the CD pressing. And it's not neccessarily the age of the CDs as I have some that are fairly old (for CDs) and they rip at 14-18x while some newer CDs hover in the 5-7x range. I find this to be true on Windows laptops as well.

You only have to rip each CD once, don't worry about it.

It's the song data that iTunes has pulled from the internet. Some albums have bad data on the internet up to and including have the song names being wrong. Remember the database iTunes is pulling from has been entered by random people and not double hecked for accuracy.

 

I agree that the song data that is pulled from the web might be of low quality, but still: if I import a single CD then it's quite obvious that this is a single album, so there's no reason to split it up. I doubt that this is based on low metadata, but instead I'm afraid it's just another 'improvement' to reduce convenience on optical media and pull people into the itunes store. Other CD rippers just don't work that way.

 

If someone has checked that it's a compilation or somewhere entered different artist/album information for various tracks, it breaks up.

I've only ever had the album splitting issue when there was bad metadata.

 

I recently imported "Greatest Hits I-III" form Queen. Metainfo was perfect, but some tracks had different artists (which is correct and reflects the reality of those songs). iTunes in its wisdom split up all albums into pseudoalbums based on the artists, which is obviously stupid.

An album is an album. 99% of imported CDs are albums and not home-made compilations. And btw. iTunes didn't do that until 2 or 3 years ago.