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.