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Why Does iTunes Suck So Much?

By drorzel on January 18, 2007.

Well, ok, it doesn't generally suck, but it's absolutely horrible at ripping CD's. I haven't done much of this lately, but in doing some other stuff, I recently discovered that I never ripped the Death cab for Cutie album Transatlanticism into my collection. So I popped it into the CD drive, and happily added all those tracks to the Music Library.

And now I'm going to delete them all, because the rips suck. The tracks skip and stutter all over the place, as if it were playing on a boom box that was being pushed down a flight of stairs. It's not just this disc, either-- I have this problem with a large number of the (several hundred) albums I ripped from CD.

If I shut down everything, restart Windows, start iTunes and then rip a CD, being careful not to do anything else with the computer, I can get a halfway decent rip of a CD. If I even have other programs running at the same time (I left Firefox open and pointed to GMail when I ripped the Death Cab record), I get garbage, even from CD's that play perfectly well.

I've enabled every feature in iTunes that claims to improve the quality of CD rips, and none of it helps. This is really incredibly annoying, because I've already paid for these songs, and don't want to pay another dollar apiece to get clean electronic copies.

So, is there another program that will do a better job of this? Some special trick that makes iTunes do a halfway reasonable job of copying the tracks into electronic format? I'm willing to consider pretty much anything short of switching to Linux or buying a Mac, because this is really amazingly annoying.

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I don't mean to be a pain in the ass, but I've used iTunes for ages and never found it to be a problem.

It's a shame too, because Translanticism is one brilliant CD!

Have you ripped anything before on the machine? It could be the drive. I found that on my system, the CD-ROM does a terrible job of ripping, while my DVD burner is nigh on perfect at it.

That is really weird. I've never run into this problem on either of my 2 Macs... nor any of my wife's PCs.

There isn't some pesky PC program opening at the same time as iTunes is there? I know when I installed iTunes on my brother's laptop, MusicMax Jukebox or soemthing would open up and fight over iTunes for control of the CD.

I'm no Windows expert, but I would re-install iTunes and Quicktime if you haven't already. Short of that, I think I'd go with the above poster... maybe a problem with the CD drive itself or the drivers or...?

I'm with Fran on this: I've never had a problem with iTunes on either a windows or mac computer.

I'd check the cd drive itself (is it clean?), the drivers and possibly any updates to the software that you havent downloaded yet. Also, how old is the computer?

In any case, good luck! I'd also search on lifehacker.com, because I'm sure someone has asked this before.

By meerasedai (not verified) on 18 Jan 2007 #permalink

I've never had a problem with iTunes but back in my nerdier days when I actually cared I used the dork golden standard, a program called "Exact Audio Copy" combined with the mp3 encoder "lame". I think these are both free online with a google search.

I'm with Jeff on this one--the only time I've had problems ripping with iTunes were on CDs that were visibly damaged. However, in order to get a DRM-free rip of my CDs I went after a freeware ripper. I would up using CDex, myself.

cdex is pretty cool and can also be used as a frontend to lame for encoding wavs to mp3s.

It's just you Chad.

I rip with iTunes all the time, and it works flawlessly on my laptop (Dell Latitude D800), my desktop (custom computers by ME!), and the G5 next to my desk here at work.

The default settings blow chunks, so you might want to look at that, but it still shouldn't be producing choppy mp3s.

Kail: DRM free? iTunes produces standard MP3s that can be played on anything.

Unless you're talking about CDs with stupid copy protection on them, in which case, getting TweakUI from Microsoft and turning off autorun fixes that problem (if the CD doesn't automagically run the data track, the audio tracks are accessable just like any other disc, and can be played or ripped with anything you choose).

I'm with the people above: Try CDex because it is perfect in every way, but, really, iTunes sucks in many ways but that's not normally one of them.

Do you have any problems if you stick the CD in and play it normally on your PC, instead of ripping it? You might very well have a dirty (or just bad) CD drive.

I had that exact problem with a couple of CDs (out of a couple hundred) that I ripped on my mac, but it went away when I checked the "Use error correction" option in the preferences and re-ripped the CDs.

So I vote with the people who say it's the CDs themselves or the drive.

By Chris Goedde (not verified) on 18 Jan 2007 #permalink

Unfortunately, such suckage is rarely due to iTunes except as symptom rather than cause. Time to look at the hardware stuffed inside your PC and what piece of hardware is using what interrupts and so on. As others say, might be the drive itself causing the problem, but in my experience it's often more to do with a combination of factors.

Jamie: I got .m4a's from my iTunes cd adventures, which won't work with my ancient mp3 player. Probably just a case of me missing a checkbox or using the wrong tool.

Kail, .m4a doesn't mean they have DRM, it just means they're a newer file format tham .mp3. Nothing you rip from a CD should have DRM protection. The DRM-protected files you can buy from iTunes are in the m4a format, but usually have a .m4p extension.

Kail (#14): M4A is iTunes' default ripping format, but you can change it to MP3. Also, FWIW, the M4A files you get from ripping a CD are not DRM'ed, they're just a funky format.

As for Chad's problem: 1) I must concur with everybody else that it's not a general iTunes problem, it's probably a hardware problem or an hardware-software interaction problem, and 2) I don't know from 3rd-party software, but Windows Media Player will rip CDs to MP3 if you give it the right settings.

I'd rip it with another program (your choice) to .mp3, then open itunes and drag the files into your library. If you have allowed iTunes to keep your music organized, then you are done.

EAC is a very featureful ripper, but one of these reasons it's a dork standard is that it's got a typical Interface From Hell. Be prepared to spend some time with a guide. (In my experience.)

Add me to the pool of "It's probably not iTunes that's the source of the trouble" people.

Go to advanced in preferences, crank up the sample rate!

I had this exact issue on iTunes on my mac, but what actually it turned out to be was a precursor to the CD drive dying. First CD mp3 rips came out all terrible and skippy, then when I played normal CDs they came out all terrible and skippy, then cds would just lock up iTunes after playing them for a few seconds, now nothing I do is able to retrieve audio data from the CD drive at all.

I don't know what to do with it, but if there's some way you can swap out the CD drive and test it, I guess maybe try that?

EAC is the oldest ripping software built with a quality rip in mind. Many would say it's still the only decent ripping software worth considering on the Wintel platform.

I'm on a mac, but I experience the same issue with iTunes if I'm trying to run other processes on my computer while I rip. If I don't listen to the CD as I'm ripping, and quit other applications and avoid surfing/emailing, it's fine. Might be worth a shot before changing hardware.

Also, if you're on a network, be sure to turn off iTunes sharing before ripping - someone else accessing your music library could cause a skip, too, theoretically.

I also think that it is more likely a hardware issue. It's possible that your system is below par on memory or even the processor. That would fit with iTunes working if it is the first and only program running.

By Paul King (not verified) on 18 Jan 2007 #permalink

Add another vote for EAC. Even if your drive is starting to fail, it's aware of low-level read errors and will re-read each area until it's sure things are right. Setting it up is something of a pain, though. You'll need to get the LAME codec separately, and mess with a bunch of settings. Once that's done initially, though, ripping is as easy as with any other software.

By lazybratsche (not verified) on 18 Jan 2007 #permalink