The song that refuses to copy

Factual Questions
1

I did a search of the SDMB and read the sticky on computer questions, but this one has me really stumped.

I received a mix CD from my girlfriend, created with iTunes, which I also have. There is a song on the mix – “Radiation Vibe” by Fountains of Wayne – which I wanted to pull off the CD and put on another of mine, along with other songs obtained legally.

The only way I can combine iTunes songs with non-iTunes songs is to burn a CD of the selected iTunes songs and upload them onto SonicStage, the music software that came with my computer. This is because all downloads and rips can be processed by SonicStage. Until now.

“Radiation Vibe” will not copy onto my hard drive. About 20% into the process, an error window comes up that says “Track4. Check the file off so you may proceed to record more.” Once you close that window, the recording process stops.

I have no idea what that sentence means. A Google search brings up a single entry: someone, like me, posting a query about this strange behavior, with no answer given.

SonicStage is Sony creation, and they seem to have given up on it, because there’s very little help on the various Sony tech support pages.

The three songs before “Radiation Vibe” record onto my hard drive with no problem, as does the track right after it. What does SonicStage want me to do? Is the song somehow protected? Some kind of glitch? It sounds fine, it uploads onto iTunes, and I’m sure everything would be okay if I burned it right from there. But the mix I’m making contains songs that aren’t in iTunes (and some still on CD’s), so I have to use SonicStage. Unless there’s some way to make them iTunes-compatible?

I’m using SonicStage 1.5, by the way, and iTunes 4.9.

This is driving me crazy.

2

All I have to offer is that when I have tried to make working copies of CDs (so I keep my master copies from getting scratched) with various encoded copy protection schemes, sometimes the only way to get it to work was to rip and encode to mp3 format (K3B using LAME encoder), and then create a new CD using those mp3s. Of course, by doing this the quality of the recording is degraded, but since I mostly listen in my vehicle, which has a high noise floor, it wasn’t really an issue. If I were going to listen to these CDs on high quality gear at home, I’d probably need to find another way to create a duplicate.