Why can't I rip mp3s?

October 23, 2006 6:35 AM

For some reason, when I try to rip/import anything off a CD, all the audio on my laptop slows down to a choppy crawl.

In the past few weeks, I've noticed that any time I try to rip something off a CD, be it with iTunes or any other program, the audio on anything else playing turns into an indecipherably slow and choppy crawl, be it an mp3, a website or whatever. I use a Toshiba Satellite. Any obvious culprits?

posted by Ash3000 to computers & internet (6 comments total)

My guess is that your drive has gotten into PIO mode instead of DMA. Here's instructions with screenshots for checking that under XP.
posted by pocams at 6:42 AM on October 23, 2006

Thank you for your help, but this doesn't seem to be the case - my transfer mode for the drive is 'DMA if available.'
posted by Ash3000 at 6:50 AM on October 23, 2006

Check again, it may be "DMA if available", but be in PIO mode. Windows has a very bad habit of forcing the drive into PIO mode after a certain number of errors.

Almost invariably this is the case. Sometimes you even have to go into the registry and change things to reset Windows' error counter.
posted by fake at 7:30 AM on October 23, 2006

Do you mean the audio on anything else playing simultaneous to ripping snarfs up?
posted by chrissyboy at 3:53 PM on October 23, 2006

Yes, that's exactly what I mean - be it on the web, another mp3, a dvd, whatever - if it's playing while a cd is being ripped, the sound is worthless.
posted by Ash3000 at 5:54 PM on October 23, 2006

I've always been lead to believe that ripping / encoding was one of those things you should leave the computer to do on its own to be honest, otherwise there's a danger of glitchy encodes, read errors etc etc.

However, if you're saying it used to handle it ok, then maybe it's a hard drive issue? I know it's an obvious thing to suggest, but have you tried freeing up some disk space and doing a defrag?
posted by chrissyboy at 10:41 PM on October 24, 2006