Betalogue

I have already written about this recurring problem I am having when mounting optical media on my G4. Essentially, what happens is that, 20 seconds or so after I’ve inserted the CD (or DVD) — i.e. the time it takes for the drive to spin up and start reading the CD — my entire Mac OS X environment starts stuttering and experiences temporary, but elongated freezes that are most annoying because I am usually trying to do something else while the CD is mounting.

I get the spinning beachball and everything freezes, except for the mouse pointer. Then I regain control for half a second and I get another freeze. And so on.

I’ve sent a bug report to Apple and they have got back to me several times to say that they were unable to reproduce the problem. Recently, I added a second SuperDrive to my G4, and the problem is exactly the same as with the SuperDrive that came with the machine. It is particularly noticeable when mounting audio CDs.

Well, now I have noticed something else: the length of the freezes appears to be proportional to the number of tracks on the audio CD! I just inserted an audio CD with 27 tracks, which is somewhat unusual (most CDs having between 10 and 15 tracks) — and the main freeze was extraordinarily long. A full 25 seconds or so.

So I am sending another bug report to Apple with this additional information… It’s quite frustrating when you are trying to rip CDs in the background while doing something else. Really, an operation as simple as mounting a CD should be able to take place in the background without interfering with your work.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Thursday, September 16th, 2004 at 1:27 am and is filed under 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.