Last night I had to burn a bunch of CDs for a friend, which I usually use iTunes for. And since my iBook is currently out of commission, I’ve been back to using my PC again. Apple just released the newest version of iTunes (iTunes 5.0.1) so I figured I’d download it for my PC and use it to do my burning. The new release is supposed to fix a variety of bugs and offer some stability improvements for PC users. Anyway, the download and install all went fine and a few minutes later I’ve got the application up and running. So I pop in the first blank CD and click the Burn button. Everything seems to be going fine and since I had a bunch of homework to finish, I minimized iTunes while the CD was burning to work on some word processing. A couple of minutes later, I maximize iTunes again to see how far the burning has to go and its about 2/3 of the way through. I watch the little meter on top that tells you what track it is burning and how many minutes are left and it doesn’t seem to be moving like it was. Pretty soon the “time left” meter starts increasing instead of decreasing and my CD burner starts slowing down. I decided to let it continue doing this, thinking that it will maybe start flying again soon; but five minutes later the time left is still increasing. That was enough for me so I hit eject on the cd burner and waited for the tray to open. Two minutes later and I’m still waiting… I clicked the eject button on iTunes thinking maybe that would override it. Nope. Disc is still inside cd burner spinning away. So I quit iTunes through the task manager and the f’ing CD is still whizzing away inside the burner. At this point I’ve tried to eject the CD every possible way there is and I’m ready to restart the computer. Start, shut down, restart, ok. More waiting and then the desktop icon for iTunes starts flashing all crazy-like and the computer still does not want to restart. Oh yeah, the CD was still happily spinning away. No more waiting for me, I held in the power button for my PC and a few seconds later, that worthless CD finally stopped its endless spin.
Anyway, after going through this same process two more times, I realized that the problem started whenever I would maximize iTunes after minimizing it. I got my first successful burn by leaving iTunes minimized through the entire burn process and 14 CDs later I was done.
The point of this rant: either my PC is dumb or iTunes is. And I need to figure out when you are supposed to start a new paragraph.
