odd itunes ripping behavior

[Phat Ham]

I'm on a late 2008 MBP 2.0.

I've been re-ripping all of my cds on my new machine and it seems either iTunes or the superdrive has a mind of its own when it comes to ripping behavior. There are 3 different speeds the superdrive will spin at when ripping. I'm ripping at AAC 256kbps VBR with error correction turned on.

The first speed is slow enough that I can't even tell the cd is spinning in the drive.

The second speed is fast enough that I can feel and hear the disc spinning, but not anything that would cause concern. The ripping speed in iTunes seems to be about twice as fast as the above mentioned "slow" speed.

The third speed is where the superdrive spins at what seems like a million rpm and makes all sorts of noise and makes me afraid the whole computer is going to vibrate into pieces. It also seems to be a major resource hog as sometimes itunes music playback will stop for a few seconds. Sometimes in between songs it will spin down only to spin back up to rip the next song.

I'm not sure what causes these different speeds but if someone could shed some light on this I'd appreciate it. It's been doing this since I got the MBP. I've updated to all the latest software but the behavior persists.

 

[Phat Ham]

nobody else has had this issue?

 

[cptpower]

I'd say it would have to do with Error Correction. If the disc your importing is scratched/dirty, then the spin speed will alter accordingly so that the drive is able to correctly read the information on the disc.

Turn off Error Correction and see what happens; it may spin at the same speed all the time then. However, you'll potentially be left with songs ripped that have skips in them.

 

[geoelectric]

Funny, your wording is very similar to what I posted to the Max (another ripper) forum here:

http://forums.sbooth.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2171

It talks about Max, but I think it's really a function of the drive itself. Like I say in the post/below, iTunes always seem to rip at 6x no matter what, at the "middle" speed.

I'm curious too, because I've been really disappointed with the ripping performance of this laptop. I'm used to getting something more like 24x+ on my PC boxen.

Geo

Max doesn't spin drive up to full speed on MacBook Pro

Postby geoelectric on Mon Jul 07, 2008 2:19 am
I'm running into a problem where I'm getting very slow rips on my Penryn MacBook Pro, at least sometimes. Here's the behavior I'm seeing:

The drive appears to have three basic speeds: off (no spin), quiet spin, and noisy spin.

When I insert a disc, it usually spins up to noisy spin. After maybe 30 seconds, it goes to quiet spin. After a minute or two, it goes to off.

In iTunes, if I import a CD, iTunes always ratchets the drive to quiet spin and imports at 6xish. This is much of the reason I went searching for something else.

In Max, if I start importing while the drive is in noisy spin, I get 12x+. If I let the drive fall back to quiet spin, Max usually spins it back up to noisy spin and I get 12x+. Sometimes it doesn't, and I get 6x. If I let the drive go to full off, Max never spins it all the way up, and I always get 6x.

This doesn't appear to be a function of CD quality. Some CDs do end up being quiet spin immediately after insert, like the drive's spinning down to read a dirty disc, and these always rip at 6x. However, I can reproduce the above behavior with pretty much any disc straight from the shrinkwrap. This is all with the basic ripper. The other rippers are the expected fraction of this speed (i.e. roughly 0.5 for comparison ripper, etc.), so I think the speeds I'm seeing are a direct function of the drive spin/extraction rate.

I haven't hooked up an external drive yet for comparison, or tried this on anyone else's MBP (mostly because I don't know anyone else with one).

Has anyone seen this behavior? Is it possible Max needs something like EAC's "spin up the drive before ripping" option?