Hey, I made Mac OS X Freeze

I’ve been addicted to the “one-click simplicity” that iTunes provides when it comes to ripping CDs. Stick it in, press the Import button, wait a few minutes, and it’s done. However, today, I ran across a CD that had some damage on it. iTunes ended up sputtering all over itself during the process, which caused the rest of the computer to come to a screeching halt.

Opt-Apple-Escape is a bit like the Ctrl-Alt-Del on a PC: it brings up the “kill the process” screen where you can select and forcibly kill the offending process. I got real familiar with that while troubleshooting what the problem is. I even took it a step further and checked the command line. Sure enough, iTunes was taking the resources and it got nuked.

iTunes should handle a bad CD much better than it did there. And Mac OS X isn’t supposed to freeze either. What the hell?