Various computer changes/mishaps mean my iTunes library on my old laptop and on the netbook is in a bit of a mess.
The library needs to be on the MacBook.
I think some tunes have gone missing from the iPod itself, so restoring from that is not a good option.
I've decided to bite the bullet and burn the lot afresh to the MacBook.
Laborious, but at least the job will be done right.
I'm curious about burn speed.
Some discs seem to rattle through at up to 20x, while some struggle to make half that.
Why is this?
Last edited by: Iffy on Fri 8 Apr 11 at 09:37
|
|
Quality of discs possibly? If there is some damage (e.g. surface scratching or dirt) it may be having to re-read a lot to get the data. Could also be that you at times have other intensive tasks running at the same time?
|
|
Did the disks come from the same pack? Because disks do have different write speeds - some of mine are only marked 4x.
|
...Did the disks come from the same pack...
Focus,
I mean't burning (should that be ripping?) pre-recorded original music CDs to the iTunes library.
Smokie,
Disc quality could well have something to with it.
I've looked after my collection reasonably well, but I'm not precious about it, so there will be a few fingers marks/scratches/dirt on some of them.
I'm not running much else other than C4P.
The aluminium case of the Mac is getting quite warm, so I've propped up the back to let some air circulate underneath.
Last edited by: Iffy on Fri 8 Apr 11 at 10:37
|
>> ...Did the disks come from the same pack...
>>
>> Focus,
>>
>> I mean't burning (should that be ripping?) pre-recorded original music CDs to the iTunes library.
Ah yes, sorry - I got the wrong end of the stick. Burning does AFAIK usually mean writing to writeable media, but if I'd been awake I would have understood what you meant.
Yes, it does surprise me that the ripping speed varies so much.
Last edited by: Focus on Fri 8 Apr 11 at 10:45
|
As smokie says it has to be because the disk has scratches or finger prints. Cleaning the disk may help.
The laptop is getting hot because it is encoding the music to digital format and will be going as fast as it can, i.e. CPU to the max. When I ripped music into iTunes I made sure the format was MP3 (high quality) and not AAC because it is usable on more systems.
When you complete the process, take a backup of the iTunes library folder to somewhere safe ;-)
Personally I'd start out by getting the music I can off the iPod and only rip the missing ones.
|
rtj,
Thanks for that.
I am giving the discs a quick clean, but the speed still seems to vary, so the CD drive must be very sensitive to marks.
It's OK because the job is progressing reasonably smoothly and quickly.
Think I've done about 30 discs so far, about 100 to go.
The default setting on iTunes is AAC, since I've started with that I'm inclined to leave as is.
Provided the library loads onto my iPod - haven't tried that yet obviously - and plays via the laptop - which it does - I don't think I'll be doing much else with it.
I did think about trying to get stuff off the iPod, but it's not simple, and I'm not sure what's missing, so it would take as long, if not longer, to go through each CD's track listing.
One of the reasons for doing this is to get the collection properly backed up, so my Seagate usb drive is primed and ready.
|
I burn everything in MP3 - much more portable.
The case of your macbook is getting warm because that is what it is designed to do. Being metal it can act, and is therefore designed to be used, as a heat sink. Its how they make them so thin
|
"I've looked after my collection reasonably well"
Musicals?
|
...Musicals?...
None I can think of, although one of my most memorable nights out was to see 42nd Street at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London.
Frankie Vaughn was the male lead in a proper 'bang crash wallop bells and whistles big stage' production.
Even the West End theatre critics conceded it was a good show - in an obvious, two-dimensional sort of way.
I used to like some of the deep and meaningful stuff, but then I left school.
|
I've noticed rip speeds increase towards the end of the disc.
The reason is quite simple, according to this link:
www.macworld.com/article/141066/2009/06/rip_cds_better.html
CDs are read from the centre outwards.
The drive spins at the same speed, but more data is read from further out because more whizzes past for each revolution of the disc.
|
|
Drive speed is variable according to error rate. You can hear it changing.
|
iffy, the same difference with read speed is seen with spinning hard drives (not the Flash memory variety hence me saying spinning). The angular velocity of the outer edge of disks is higher and there are also far more sectors of data there. Therefore on high performance systems it was common to put the important files on the outer edge of a drive.
I bet the likes of Zero knows all about this.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Fri 8 Apr 11 at 22:30
|
Ah the days where you could manually place data on the disk!
It was a carefull balance of seek times by track, (that old arm took ages to move to the right place on the disk) speed of data being read from the drive, and chaining your data together so it was all sequential on the same tracks.
|
|
Brings back memories of my first really technical course in the 80s, one section was repairing a 288mb disk by hand, rechaining blocks in the VTOC etc etc. We also covered core memory dump analysis - the course was run in Belgium (four weeks) and one of the sample memory dumps was from a French publicly available "chat" service - may have been called Minitel. Even in the 80s (pre web?) people were doing weird & naughty things "online" - we were reassembling bits of conversations in between analysing causes of failure...
|
To a certain extent you could place data on a single disk by clever partitioning. But with RAID volumes and now SANs and NAS that's gone out of the window.
I do wonder how enterprise class systems are better off with iSCSI connected NAS storage than local fast storage (e.g. fibre connected). But clearly I am in the minority.
How's the disk ripping going iffy? Therapeutic? And boring I guess.
|
>> To a certain extent you could place data on a single disk by clever partitioning.
Partitioning?
Good grief, I am talking IBM 3370 and 3380 disks, and CKD - direct cylinder-head-record addressing. You could actually place the data where you wanted on the disk.
|
|
I was talking now and what people have done. Installing Linux on a system in 1993 was a lot more involved than it is now too. CD-ROMs drives.... what were they
|
Back to 2011 and I've finally completed my CD ripping, apart from a few stragglers which might be in the caravan or in a player somewhere.
I've also done what for me is the mother of all backups - about 26GB - nearly all iTunes as I don't really have much other data.
Ripping all those CDs was a laborious process, although I suppose I have some sense of achievement from a job well done.
Now I'll have to buy a bigger iPod to take my newly enlarged library.
|
did all the track titles, album, artists, and genre metadata tags all rip as well?
|
...did all the track titles, album, artists, and genre metadata tags all rip as well?...
Think so - I was quite impressed some of the track listings came up.
A few of the CDs began life stuck to the front of a newspaper or magazine so were hardly mainstream.
|
Importing CDs into iTunes - smokie
