Mac-heads: The Heat Death of the iTunes-iverse?

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Sorry for the lame physics reference.

Those of you who've been following my Apple purchase saga know I've gotten a shiny (well, satin-finish, anyway) 15" PowerBook.

Specs: 1GHz, 60 GB, 784 MB, ComboDrive.

Still running Jaguar (at nostatic's recommendation). I've downloaded all the updates.

What's the deal here? When the case starts to get "warm to the touch", iTunes crashes when I try to "Import" from a CD to MP3! (160 kb/s, VBR). AKA rip to MP3. If I unsleep after letting the machine cool down and try to rip the CD, it works with no problems! If it starts to get warm, however, iTunes will sometimes hang and sometimes just puke (shut down unexpectedly etc.).

Anyone else have this problem? I've turned off playback during rip as this seems to make the problem worse (duh, higher CPU load).

blue

[cstreit]

Is it iTUnes? ...or the CD?

CD players and drives have always had problems with heat... ...if I recall it was a head-alignment issue.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

I don't think it's the CD...I haven't had any trouble with extended DVD playback. Yet.

[nostatic]

I've never seen/heard this problem. I don't do VBR when I import though. Maybe try fixed rate?

[BlueSkyJaunte]

I'll give it a try. VBR is useful for stuff with lots of silence (like audio books).

However this is reproduceably temperature-related. Maybe I've got a knackered CPU fan?

As a confounding factor I will be installing Panther shortly. The way I work, I find that I need the Expose feature. I spend too much time hunting around for the right window since I'm still not used to how the WM works.

[nostatic]

who knows...maybe Panther will fix it. Do you ever hear the fans come on when the unit gets hot? Mine don't come on very often, but I can hear them when they do.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Update:

Installed Panther. No dice. I do get to submit bug reports now.

Switch to 160 kb/s with no VBR. No dice.

Switch to 128 kb/s no VBR. Got further down the CD (17 tracks out of 66 instead of 5/66 were ripped succesfully), but it still crashed. Am I "spamming" Apple with all of these bug reports?

Put CD in my Linux box, installed Grip, installed LAME, rip/encode was successful at 160 kb/s VBR. Took 30 minutes. Sigh.

I'll have to listen more closely to hear the fan if/when it comes on. Where is the processor on this thing? Upper left corner (near the screen)?

PS: Expose is neat. It does solve my window management issues.

[nostatic]

30 minutes? I can rip a disk in about 4 or 5 minutes. What disk are you ripping that has 66 tracks?

This is an odd one...never heard of a problem like this. There have been the occasional CD hardware issues, but iTunes has been rock stable on all our machines.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

"The Lord Of The Rings" on audio CD.

9 discs, 60-70 tracks per disc.

Haven't yet tried a "regular" music CD, but that's because I had already ripped them in a former life.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Update:

Just found a CD I hadn't ripped (with good reason: Metallica's Garage Days) and that ripped OK even when the PowerBook is warm to the touch. 128 kb/s VBR.

iTunes must just not like Tolkien or something! Maybe it's the 66 tracks that are the issue. Or maybe something else entirely.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Another Update:

I found this hint at kbase.info.apple.com. I went into the Disk Utility and fixed all permission problems.

I've been able to rip 3 LOTR CDs so far with no problems.

Strange stuff!!!!

[nostatic]

sorry...should have suggested that. The repair permissions is standard first try when things start misbehaving.

[BlueSkyJaunte]

Funny, I never have that problem w/ Linux.

Well, I'm up to disc 6 (of 9) and boy, whoever put these things into CDDB sure didn't care much about consistency! Is there any way to get iTunes to read from FreeDB instead??