I had a stack of CDs that my PowerBook just didn't want to read (most of them had fairly ugly scratches on them), so I couldn't bring the contents into iTunes. Well I happened to gaze over at my IDE DVD burner that is in a external FireWire enclosure and thought I would give it a shot. After hooking it up, low and behold, every one of my CDs that was having problems is now imported into my iTunes collection. What is even better is that I consistently get ripping speeds of 13x, where my internal CD drive would be anywhere from 1.2x to 16x.
I have no idea if my PowerBook CD drive is out of alignment or picky, or if my DVD burner is better on the error correction. But now I have an alternate that seems to work when my PowerBook drive doesn't!
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20041214173726985