iTunes becoming more and more unreliable for uploading CD's?

[mhschmieder]

This is very specific to the latest updates to iTunes as running on SNow Leopard in 64-bit mode.

I am increasingly having problems with CD's not loading correctly. On playback from iTunes, I get skips, and re-loading often makes it worse. These CD's show no signs of dust, scratches, or other problems -- though of course those aren't always easy to detect.

It happens most on longer CD's (700 MB vs. 650 MB), but these are pre-recorded, not CDr's (I sold my hi fi system to avoid constant rewiring between hi-fi listening and production work, so have to upload CD's to listen to them anymore).

Is it possible my late 2010 MacPro's CD tray is already wearing out, due to heavy use? Are they replaceable? Is there a tool to diagnose them?

I suspect iTunes though as this only started happening after the latest updates.

More specifically, I can no longer find the preference for quality over speed; they seem to have removed or hidden it, and the updater bar shows VERY high transfer speeds that are beyond my usual level of trust on audio (vs. data) uploads.

[billf]

This is very specific to the latest updates to iTunes as running on SNow Leopard in 64-bit mode.

I am increasingly having problems with CD's not loading correctly. On playback from iTunes, I get skips, and re-loading often makes it worse. These CD's show no signs of dust, scratches, or other problems -- though of course those aren't always easy to detect.

It happens most on longer CD's (700 MB vs. 650 MB), but these are pre-recorded, not CDr's (I sold my hi fi system to avoid constant rewiring between hi-fi listening and production work, so have to upload CD's to listen to them anymore).

Is it possible my late 2010 MacPro's CD tray is already wearing out, due to heavy use? Are they replaceable? Is there a tool to diagnose them?

I suspect iTunes though as this only started happening after the latest updates.

More specifically, I can no longer find the preference for quality over speed; they seem to have removed or hidden it, and the updater bar shows VERY high transfer speeds that are beyond my usual level of trust on audio (vs. data) uploads.

The drives in the MacPro can go bad. But the first thing to do is to clean the lasers. You can find DVD/CD drive laser lens cleaners online - I think I got mine at OWC IIRC. If the cleaner doesn't fix it, then you do likely have lasers that aren't functioning anymore, and you can find replacement Superdrives online. Again, places like OWC carry these, and they are fairly inexpensive and easy to swap out.

You can also try VLC player and see if that makes a difference.

[mhschmieder]

Thanks, Bill. I'll see if I still have my CD/DVD drive cleaner or if I handed it off when I sold my audio CD players a couple of years back. I may have assumed they can't be used in computer media trays and gotten rid of it.

I've had VLC Player for years in order to be able to play videos from music projects (I don't watch commercial video content). I forgot that it's also for music. I dragged the CD to it just now and it opened it in a playlist without recognizing CD Text (like iTunes in the old days). No skips! So I think the iTunes problem is related to not adequately putting quality over speed when loading, since VLC Player is playing in real-time (I haven't yet investigated its menus and manual to see if it's possible to use it to actually upload content to the computer itself).

OK, so this confirms that iTunes is at fault, in the sense that it seems to have taken away the former preference for always putting accuracy above time to upload.

[cuttime]

I'm sure you already tried this, but have you got "use error correction when reading audio CDs" checked in your import settings? (General Preferences>Import Settings.) Other than that, I got nothing. I feel your pain, iTunes continues a long, steep decline. I really think it should be 4 or 5 applications at this point, and not one bloated, lumbering behemoth

[mhschmieder]

Yep, I have that checked and also verified last night that a software update hadn't "helped" me by unchecking it.

I wasted time last year looking for better players/uploaders and gave up. The good ones wrap iTunes so inherit its problems, except for the one that cost $400 (maybe from Sequoia Systems; I forget) which is a standalone app that communicates with iTunes to use its organizational features but ignores everything else in iTunes and overloads with custom code.

[billf]

Importing with VLC is possible, albeit somewhat convoluted as it isn't designed to be an iTunes replacement per se. But it does work with audio, and if iTunes is giving you fits, it's probably worth a try.

In version 2.07 go to File > Streaming Exporting Wizard. This will bring up a window with two options. Select 'Transcode/Save to file' and hit the "next" button. This brings up a window with another two choices, the second which should be your CD tracks. Select that, and next is a window that allows you to set your audio transcoding settings (mp3, WAV, etc.).

Hope that helps. I'm still using itunes v 10 because of all the horror stories with v11.

[billf]

Here's another encoding alternative:

http://www.c7software.com/PhileAudio

[mhschmieder]

Cool; thanks. That alternate encoder looks worth having regardless, as I rarely am successful with cover art being found by iTunes, or correct CD information (one Natalie Cole CD popped up with Phil Oakey of Human League as songwriter for all songs, and it was 20's/30's oldies!).

I hope to have a chance to try your VLC hints before going to bed tonight, and maybe if it's quick I can download and play with Phile Audio as well. I doubt I would have found that on my own. I remain shocked that Phonolog didn't make the transition from paper to computer; when I worked in a record store I update the logs with the new pages each week.

[mhschmieder]

The VLC approach appeared to work at first, but did something weird. I dragged the CD to the Playlist so that I could select the faulty tracks from the playlist in the chooser once in the Stream Exporting Wizard. But for some reason -- even though it acknowledged that I had only selected two files -- it cycled through the whole CD one track at a time. I waited patiently to see what would happen next, then it started cycling through a second, and then a third time.

By this time, the playlist had about 100 tracks in it (three redundant copies per song). Yet looking at the codecs, file locations, and details, ALL of them showed up as being on the CD drive (impossible as it's a commercial CD, not a CD-rw). But I selected the Desktop as a temporary placeholder until renaming. Nothing showed up there.

Possibly tweaking some of those choices would produce better results, but I'm too tired now (I've only gotten four hours sleep a night for almost a month now). I'll see if I can muster the energy to try again without a playlist, but I've run out of steam to download Phile Audio.

[mhschmieder]

OK, it seems to require selecting a stream vs. a playlist ref. Then you give it the filename and location you want for the WAV file (selecting uncompressed integer format).

Unfortunately, the resulting files are truncated as it stops when it detects errors. So, somehow the playback mode is more forgiving than the transcoding mode.

Just for kicks I checked to see whether iTunes would function better as a playback machine than as a transcoding engine as well, and sure enough, no skips when in real-time mode!

On the other hand, you could hear clicks from missing data in iTunes, whereas VLC sounded like a clean disc playing back. BTW the disc is clean and no scratches are discernible.

[mhschmieder]

I like how Phile Audio's example playlist is the Mask album from Bauhaus.

I won't be downloading it though as it seems you can ONLY buy it through the Mac App Store, and I don't care to get involved with that beast (I've never gone near it yet).

The one and only customer review has a lot of caveats about poor integration with iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/id413934579

If it were available for regular purchase I would buy it right now. But I am way too slammed to have time to investigate what it means to get involved with the Mac App Store. Sounds scary.

[mhschmieder]

Hah, dragging the files from the CD icon to the Desktop and then to iTunes, is about the worst approach possible! No errors are noted, but the files are truncated at the first error detected, and the files that result are warbly, full of static, etc. Proof positive that you can't copy files from a CD as though they are data.

I am guessing that most commercial CD's have a tremendous number of errors, and that data in general does but that most data correction happens redundantly on the fly each time the data is accessed. As most data isn't accessed linearly from start to finish and at a near-constant data interval, only music-oriented software would know how to deal with proper real-time error-correction of audio files.

And here I thought that problem would go away when I got rid of my fancy hi-fi audio CD player, as I thought only hardware playing back in real-time had to deal with fancy error correction algorithms and that audio files uploaded to a computer had already been error-corrected during the uploading and/or conversion!

[mhschmieder]

Looks like the Mac App Store is safe after all. I was concerned because I don't own any mobile devices and I figured it was going to require a lot of mobile syncing and the like, as well as tracking my every move via GPS.

There's also an alternate player listed there called Vox (not the amp company):

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/08/06/vox ... s-readers/

This is breaking news as of this past Tuesday so likely few have seen it yet. Looks to be free.

I was just about to install it but it requires OS X 10.7 or later.

For that matter, Phile Audio is also limited to OS X 10.7 and later.

As I can't buy OS X 10.7 anymore, I'm very frustrated, due to several other apps and upgrades I have to hold off on. Mavericks just entered its fourth developer preview phase, but I suspect we won't see it in retail until November or even December.