slow itunes rips

[kryptonitejesus]

My iTunes usually rips cds without error protection up to 16x or so, but lately today it's been in the low 8x's, is there anything I can do to help the speed a little bit? What cripples the CD rip speed the most? Drive speed? The cd itself? RAM? CPU?

Let me know, cause I got like 70 more cds to rip and I don't want it to take any longer than it has to. (They've all been ripped 192vbr AAC too, btw, nothing different)

 

[Asylum Design]

make sure the cd's are as clean as possible. Any trouble reading can cause slowdowns. Also, to troubleshoot your drive, stick in and re-rip a previous cd that you know for sure ripped at 16x or so. This will at least give you some info regarding if you need to look at it from a media POV or a hardware POV.

My .02

 

[Tyler76]

iTunes has an option to do "error correction" while ripping. If this is enabled it will run slower then MusicMatch. Of course, any little scratch also won't give you a pop, like in MusicMatch. Assuming, of course, that you don't have any error correction enabled in MusicMatch.
What I really think makes for the difference is that you are not only ripping, you are encoding as well. iTunes uses AAC, which is much slower to encode (although I believe QuickTime's and iTune's is the fastest so far) then the FHG FastEnc MP3 encoder that MusicMatch uses.
Remember that "slower" isn't always, and usually isn't, a bug. Most of the time, something takes more time because it is doing a better job.