When iTunes Chokes
I’ve imported a lot of CDs with iTunes over the last few years. It usually goes well, but now and again something will get screwed. Sometimes I’ll wind up with a file that’s got several minutes of dead space on the end. Or, worse, iTunes will hang during the import process, freezing the system and forcing me to reboot. The latter happened to me today on a new CD I picked up.
The CD was released back in ’97, so in physical terms it’s not exactly all that new. The first two songs imported fine, but iTunes got stuck on the third one. I tried a Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up the Windows Task Manager so that I could kill the process, but unfortunately it never appeared. The system was locked up. So I rebooted and tried again, starting from the fourth song. Once again, choke, freeze, reboot. I decided to take a different approach.
I opened up Windows Media Player and configured it to rip CD tracks to MP3 format. Then I started ripping. WMP, too, choked. Fortunately, it only locked the system temporarily and I was eventually able to kill it. So I gave up that approach and took a few deep breaths to avoid the fit of tech rage that was threatening to bubble up. With a clear head, I googled “CD ripper”.
One of the first results was a a freeware app recommended by CNet, called Free CD Ripper. I decided to give it a shot. The download is small and it’s a quick install, so I had it up and running in short order.
The interface is primitive. I had to input the info for each track manually (song title, group name, CD name, etc…). But once it got going, it did the job admirably. The tracks that caused iTunes and WMP so much trouble caused no problems at all with this little utility. Unfortunately, it did hang on two songs. But the great news is that it didn’t cause any system freeze. In fact, the app itself didn’t even freeze. I was able to click the cancel button and it just aborted. Both times, I unchecked the problem tracks, as well as the previously imported tracks, in the import list and started up again. So where both iTunes and WMP failed to deliver, Free CD Player got all but two of the tracks ripped, almost without causing any headaches. The only downside is that none of the album/artist info was saved along with the tracks. So when I imported all of the songs into iTunes I again had to go through and enter it all manually. So next time I use Free CD Ripper, I’ll just enter the track names and ignore the rest of the fields.
So if you are having trouble ripping CD tracks with iTunes or WMP, give Free CD Ripper a try and see if that gets you further along.