I’m SLOWLY getting used to the new TiBook. I’ve a question however and I doubt it’s Apple-specific. Here goes.
I can watch as the iTunes software rips the songs I have selected from the list of tracks on the CD that is inserted into the TiBook, ok? It goes so very fast, all is lovely.
At the SAME TIME however, it is also playing a track that I’ve selected, and then when that track is done, it plays the next one. Here’s the question:
How can the laser track two songs at once at DIFFERENT speeds? Or, rather, how does the TiBook juggle playing one track at realtime, while ripping at 4x speed? I have 512 of RAM and a 667Mhz chip, but still- there is AFAIK only ONE laser in the CD player.
How does the laser handle two tasks at once?? Does the TiBook actually read the ENTIRE CD at super fast speed, and then just do as I wish with different tracks? I doubt that’s it,I can hear it moving from track to track to burn…
Both the ripper and the player read ahead (even a slow drive these days might be running at 12x or 24x), save the data into memory, and do their jobs from their own buffers instead of working directly from the CD. That makes it easy for the two programs to switch back and forth without pauses. Lots of software works that way. Notice the ‘Buffering’ message when you hit a streaming-audio site, as the player accumulates a few seconds of music to allow for momentary slowdowns on your connection.
And you can tell this is the case by ejecting the CD after the ripping is done, but while the songs being ripped are still playing. It should eject without a skip. So obviously what you’re hearing is (was) not the CD.
I see your point, but after a second reading of your post, I must say this. I’m not impressed that it can eject and still hear the song playing, that is simply the use of lots of RAM.
What slays me is that JUST as I put it IN, it’s able to START both playing music and ripping tracks that are not the same track- I have actually leaned over and listened to see if somehow, it is reading the ENTIRE disk into RAM very very fast, then doing as I ask it to do. Is it possible that it’s doing that? I can’t believe it, there’s too much data on a CD. And yet, it seems to play Track 3 even as I’ve told it to rip tracks 2,3,5,6 and 12.
Incredible. They can make a machine like this, and they STILL can’t figure out how to make orange juice with no pulp !!!
Actually, CD-ROM drives have always been able to do that. Many PC games play music from the CD while simultaneously loading levels and graphics from the data tracks.
