I've been having problems importing CDs into iTunes 4.7 and wanted to import some Christmas albums. Each attempt failed with the "whirling rainbow of death" as someone put it. The CD/DVD drive becomes noisy and the computer won't hardly respond. You can switch aps briefly, but you can't even bring up the "Force Quit" dialog.
The CD would try to play during the import, but as my iBook got slower and slower, the CD would cut in and out so it was annoying to listen to. I was also concerned that it might make it harder to import the CD (though I'd been able to import CDs previously, probably under iTunes 4.6, without these problems). So, I got into the habit of stopping the play back as soon as it started when trying yet again to import a CD.
Later, I was studying the import options, trying to see if there was something I could change about the way the CD was read (found nothing like that). I noticed there was an option to tell it not to play the CD while it was importing, so I unchecked it. The next time, I tried the import, it just worked. It turns out that just trying to play the CD at the same time as the import causes this problem! I imported my stack of CDs (8-9) with only one whirling rainbow for the whole set. It's usable again!
So, if you have this problem, go into iTunes Preferences and click on "Importing" at the top. Then clear the check mark from the box labeled "Play songs while importing" and try again. On the rare occasions when the whirling rainbow drowns everything, use a paperclip to pop the drive out (or disconnect it or whatever) and click "ok" when the computer complains that you shouldn't. Then uncheck the boxes for the songs that were imported successfully and try again. Hope this helps someone else, too...
[robg adds: I thought we'd covered this one here before, but I didn't see it in the database. Disabling play on import is a really good thing to do, especially if you have a slower Mac...]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20041222205719188