Betalogue

This has been an on-going problem but today, it seems to be getting worse.

This morning, I was adding a few CDs to my iTunes Music Library by importing their tracks in AAC (MP4) format, as I often do. One of the CDs had one of those so-called “hidden tracks”, so I imported the last track as AIFF and opened it in Amadeus II to edit out the blank parts.

Usually Amadeus II is pretty fast when dealing with AIFF files. But today I noticed that, while it was opening the fairly large AIFF track (nearly 20 minutes) in the background, everything else slowed down to a crawl. I still managed to edit the file and the file saving process ran much more smoothly, so I thought nothing of it.

Then I inserted the next CDs and proceeded to import the tracks with iTunes, in the background, while I was doing other work. This normally innocuous process managed to cause three system-wide (fortunately temporary) freezes of about 30 seconds each within the space of 10 minutes!

Even though I couldn’t hear any kind of hard drive activity, this seems to confirm that the problem with these freezes is hard disk-related. After all, importing or editing audio files is a typically hard disk-intensive type of activity. I suppose it could very well be that, in recent weeks, I’ve hit a section of my internal hard drive that is a source of problems. That would explain why I had not been experiencing any freezes until recently.

For what it’s worth, the partition on which I am saving the imported audio files is 40 GB in size, and is now down to 1.58 GB of available disk space. It still seems like a lot, but it’s less than 5%. Maybe the problem is as simple as that.

In any case, this confirms that I need to start working on setting up my new hard drive as soon as possible.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, April 26th, 2004 at 11:49 pm and is filed under iTunes, Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.