Yesterday, I got two cd's from Target; Flogging Molly's "Float," and Lewis Black's newest release, "Anticipation." I went to Windows Media Player and proceeded to rip both cd's. Flogging Molly worked just fine, without a hitch, ripped at a decent speed. Then I tried to rip the Lewis Black cd, and it is taking THE LONGEST TIME to rip. The drive starts, stops, starts, and sometimes locks things up for five seconds before continuing to rip (REALLY SLOWLY). I used the regular settings (I am running WMP11 on XP, BTW), just Windows Media Audio, and it's just so slow. Anyone else having this problem or know of anyone else who does with this cd, or any cd primarily sold at Target? The cd was advertised as being sold at Target, so I'm assuming that Target has a hand in whatever's going on. I don't know. Is there anything to this, or does WMP just suck with some cd's?
WMP does suck but that is not the cause of your problem. I suspect this might be due to a bad pressing. This happens all the time with DVDs because there is little tollerance for errors. I have never heard of such a problem with a new disk. It is a combination reader - disk quality problem. With a great reader you and read poor quality disks. Try down loading the trial version of PowerAmp's converter. That has a service called acurip or something like that. Try ripping some good popular CDs first. It will check how well your reader is reading the disks compaired with its database. After a few good CDs and your readed has been verified, try the problem CDs. I would rip to either 320 CBR mp3s or extreme VBR using the slow/high quality setting. The VBR will usually give you a much better compression with Rock & Roll. The VBR mode allows yo to set the quality and the encoder compresses as much as possible while maintaining the set quality. The extreme setting using the slow/high quality sets the hearable quality to the same as a 320 CBR. An ear with perfect should not be able to tell a 320 CBR mp3 from the source. These mp3s will be superior in audio quality to anything WMP can produce. After the 30 days you can either pay up or you can discontine its use. I would not uninstal it since the ultra-useful file explorer tool will continue to operate after the 30 days. It will display all the tag info form the file explorer if you rest the pointer arrow on the file. EAC is shareware that uses the same LAME encoder for mp3s. EAC lacks all the services and all the other encoders available through PowerAmp but is still way superior to WMP.
