When I got my PowerBook a couple of years ago, I ripped most of my CD collection to iTunes. It all worked fine except for one disc: Prince’s Purple Rain.
When I put that CD in the drive, it just spun for a while, but never showed up on the desktop or in iTunes – it’s like the computer didn’t know the disc was there. I had to reboot to get the drive to spit it out.
Cut to Sunday after the Super Bowl. I remember that I haven’t uploaded PR to iTunes. I figure what the heck, I’ll try it again. Same thing happens – disc goes unrecognized, PowerBook needs to be restarted to rescue the disc.
The CD plays fine in a normal CD player. It’s a store-bought copy of the album, released by Warner Bros, not something someone burned for me in an unusual format.
What’s going on? I assume it’s a technical fluke, but what would cause this kind of behavior?
Purple Rain was released a loooong time before any CD copy protection schemes were in use. And when they were (briefly) tried, it was only for new releases. As far as I know, no existing release was ever re-released with copy protection.
Sometimes, due to slight damage or an error, a CD just Will Not Work in a particular player, even if it works fine in other ones. Try cleaning it with some warm water and a cotton cloth and see if it helps. It might just be a speck of dirt in a particularly sensitive place.
I just got the Talking Heads Brick collection for Christmas (all of their studio albums) and it does the same thing on my computer, which is disappointing because thats a lot of money for songs you cant save. I dont think it could be due to the age of the CDs as this seems liek a relatively recent set.
I would also be curious to know why this happens. I am assuming copyright protection or whatever.
Gosh, that brings back memories. My copy of Purple Rain wouldn’t work on my computers, either. It was definitely before copy protection – the only ripping was to godawfulsized AIFF files, but the Mac made a good CD player. It’d never recognize Purple Rain, though. This was either a Colour Classic, Performa 636, Quadra 6400, or iMac Graphite. I don’t think I’ve tried it on anything newer. Now I’ll have to try digging it out of where ever it is in the basement, which is still cheaper than the $1.81 that allofmp3.com wants for it.
(A quick look at my iTunes library confirms that I don’t have this album included to this day!)
