Splasm Software Discussions

I hesitate to raise this, because it's not really ABB-related; but it certainly affects my use of ABB.

I have a lot of trouble with audiobook CDs in my iMac. (I have one of the last iMacs produced before the switch to Intel. The CD / DVD drive sucks in the disk and then spits it out when done.) It's not unusual, in a batch of 10 or so, to find one disk that refuses to be read. The iMac chugs away for a couple of minutes and then spits the disk out without comment. The disk never shows up in either the Finder or in iTunes.

I've had this happen with disks that, in a previous import, were read perfectly. I went through a period when I decided I wanted to reimport some audiobooks at a different bitrate; I was only able to successfully reimport about half of them. The others all had at least one disk that could no longer be read. The disks were my own personal copies and had never been used apart from the previous import.

The only workaround I could find was to use someone else's Windows machine, with a tray-loading CD drive, import them into iTunes there, and then move the results to the iMac. I've never had a problem with an audiobook disk in that Windows machine. Given the cumbersome nature of the process, though, I typically import the CD as a single file when doing this, which limits my flexibility in structuring the chapters in ABB.

The iMac is already on its second drive. The first one died just within the one-year warranty and was replaced by Apple. The first drive had the same problem but worse.

I never have this problem with music CDs. Is there something unusually sensitive about the drives in iMacs? Are audiobooks typically of inferior quality or engineering?

I'm just curious if anyone else has experienced this. I'm tempted to buy an external CD drive just for this -- I listen to a lot of audiobooks!