Fun with hardware diagnoses
 

So I was happily using Itunes for the first time to rip a few CD's since all of my other apps no longer have CDDB access.

After about 4 disks, the computer suddenly doesn't recognize inserting a music CD. I check drivers, uninstall and reinstall hardware. After a few attempts, I begin to suspect an evil record company conspiracy. This would seem like paranoia, except there already was an evil record company conspiracy, and I was accessing older CDs.

So I found an downloaded the rootkit uninstaller, which did not find any rootkit installed.

Then, I decided to check and see if data disks would work. They didn't. The door closed, the drive light came on briefly, and Windows would not recognize a disk in the drive.

So, after using the troubleshooter, which came up empty, I went with the final option. I opened up the computer, pushed down on the ribbon connectors to both drives and the motherboard, and then took a vacuum hose and gave the motherboard and interior a quick clean.

Rebooted and everything is now ok.:thumb:

I am now adding a full size vaccuum cleaner to the sledgehammer and crowbar in my computer repair kit.;)

Exact Audio Copy might be worth checking out. It's what I use these days. The database it checks against (freedb?) seems to be at least as accurate as CDDB and it'll do variable bit rate MP3 with lame.

I tried an open source program connected to freedb and it did not find these CD's (set of 21 classical CD's). The CDDB license attached to the MP3 software I bought has apparently hit some sort of limit. Itunes was the only one left that correctly identified my CDs.

Really, what did you have? There's a lot of useless classical info in CDDB. Or at least there used to be, relevant to my collection. (Example: 4 CD opera set. There's info for discs 1, 2, and 4.)

That sucks, rich. sorry to hear of your troubles.