XP Pro and iTunes

I recently downloaded iTunes and have been giving it a test run to see how well it works. All in all, I have to say that I’m impressed. I rarely buy music these days, but when I’ve wanted something, I just jump over to the ITMS and pick it up. Pretty cool.

Well naturally, if I’m going to use iTunes for new music, I had to test it out with old music. I had ripped a couple of CDs and it was relatively painless. The first thing that tripped me up is that iTunes won’t do MP3 out of the box. You need to change the setting (Edit->Prefs->Importing). Easy enough. Once I did that, things worked really well. Except I could not get iTunes to recognize when I inserted a new CD. It was driving me crazy.

After searching and searching, I disabled all kinds of drivers, restarted iTunes, restarted my PC, still nothing. If a CD was in the drive when iTunes started, it would be found. I could import the tracks, and when it was done, that’s it. Nothing I could do would make it recognize another CD had been inserted after that. I figured it had to do with autoplay, but I couldn’t tell you how.

I checked gpedit.msc. No dice. Neither was set. I checked the properties of the CD (My Computer->Right-click CD Drive->Properties->Autoplay). Nada. Things seems to be set correctly. Finally I dug into the registry. Bingo. Apparently I had disabled it at some point. Reboot, things look better – but they’re still not there.

iTunes had been configured to import tracks and eject the CD when a new disc was inserted. Problem before was that it didn’t seem to know when a CD was inserted. Now it could see that, but seemed to be having another problem. I left that setting in iTunes, as I wanted to just change out CDs to facilitate getting things in there as quickly as possible. So I looked again at the drive’s autoplay settings. I had set it to “import with iTunes” when a disc was inserted in the drive. Acting on a hunch, I changed this to “show with iTunes”. It worked.

Apparently with both Windows and iTunes trying to import things, it didn’t work right – even though they wanted to do the same thing. But letting XP just tell iTunes about the disc and then letting iTunes do its magic and turn on importing makes it all work happily together. So now my CD drive is spinning rapidly to get all this music on my hard drive. At least enough for me to play with for a while. More later on formats and such.

Update: With this in place, the very first time you load a CD (when iTunes isn’t running), it won’t start the import automatically, and it also won’t eject the CD automatically when its done. But after you eject that CD and insert another, it seems to pick up fine.


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9 responses to “XP Pro and iTunes”

  1. Jay Pickett Avatar

    This is an update for iTunes 7.6.0.29 for the above solution.

    1) Open iTunes,
    2) Click Edit, Perferences,
    3) Click the “Advanced” TAB,
    4) Click the “Burning” Tab
    5) Select the drive you wish to import/play from and press OK.

  2. Ben Althauser Avatar
    Ben Althauser

    Anyone know if iTunes can play on startup minimized?

  3. Jesse Avatar

    Hi,
    I have had a problem with iTunes (not the same as the others here). I have two CD drives in my computer and when I put a CD in the 2nd drive, it would not see it. So, this is how I fixed the problem:
    1) Open iTunes,
    2) Click Edit, Perferences,
    3) Click the “Burning” Tab
    4) Select the drive you wish to import/play from and press OK.

    IT WORKED!!!! 🙂 I now have no other problems with iTunes. Thanks

  4. roger Avatar
    roger

    I had this problem and when I
    1) created a shortcut to itunes then
    2) right clicked on it, checked the “run as other user” box
    3) ran it as administrator
    bing it worked.
    Good luck!
    -Roger

  5. Carrie Smith Avatar
    Carrie Smith

    I had this problem on my Packard Bell PC. For some reason the virtual DVD drives were interfering with Itunes. Open them in Windows Explorer and then right click and disable them (there were 3 on mine). All burning and importing resumed after doing this. Note – if you simply uninstall them they reappear once the computer is rebooted.

  6. David Avatar
    David

    On my PC, iTunes recognizes CDs and imports tracks, but when playing either the CD or the imported tracks, all I get is this cyclic ticking noise, like its playing a few frames of audio over and over. It’s the same on both CDROMs in the machine. Any thoughts?

  7. Bendergrub Avatar
    Bendergrub

    Welp, I also have a ACER Laptop with a Mitsumi SR243T1 CD-ROM drive and i was curious if any of you folks have tried to upgrade to a CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive?
    I have been having one hell of a time tring to find an upgrade for my travelmate. seems like ACER doesn’t want to provide me with a model number for one that might fit. so i was woundering if any of you know of a model that could replace mine that is a CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive.

  8. Brian Mikalis Avatar
    Brian Mikalis

    I’m having the exact same problem. I can’t get iTunes to consistently recognize the CD. I’ve tried rebooting, setting iTunes to “show,” downloading new software, but can’t get it to work. I have a stack of borrowed CDs I’m dying to burn. Can anyone help?

  9. Steve Avatar

    Hi there,
    I am having a similar problem to you. I have an ACER laptop which as a Mitsumi SR243T1 CD-ROM drive. It has the latest version of iTunes and the Autoplay is set to show in iTunes. When I insert a CD iTunes starts but does not show the CD. I have tried various combinations of the Autoplay and nothing works, well, Windows Media Player works perfectly when you insert a CD. I have attempted to find help on the Apple website, but nothing has worked so far. If anyone else has had a similar problem and solved it I would love to know, so please get in contact.

    Cheers!

    Steve Hoare