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Topic: How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes (Read 4038 times) previous topic - next topic
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How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

If I ever felt sorry for Mac users, then it was because simply inserting a copy protected CD into their disc drive could make their whole system crash. That's a pathetic thing to do from the CD manufacturers, but on a Windows system that could never happen, right?

Wrong.

Get iTunes started and insert a copy proteced CD: iTunes stops responding and cannot be shut down. Launching another app fails and so does the shutdown - same behaviour via task manager. Only the power off button helped on my otherwise very stable Windows XP system.

As I wasn't even aware that I had a copy protected CD (never been an issue before, having used EAC and the Yamaha F1 drive) I am not sure what kind of copy protection it is. The CD is Ayumi Hamasaki's 'Rainbow'.

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #1 –
more than a year with OS X, never seen a single system crash, no reason to feel sorry for us 
the earth is flat and the bottom is a place we call hell...

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #2 –
In iTunes for Windows, another way to crash your PC is enable Sound Check.

The more music in your library, the higher chance of crash.

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #3 –
Quote
If I ever felt sorry for Mac users, then it was because simply inserting a copy protected CD into their disc drive could make their whole system crash. That's a pathetic thing to do from the CD manufacturers, but on a Windows system that could never happen, right?

Inserting a copy protected CD shouldn't make your computer crash, and I sincerely doubt that it ever would. However, in the worst case, it can make your CD-drive lock up and refuse to eject the CD. This is because Apple's CD-drives are made for CD's, and inserting anything else into them is at your own risk.

Please don't feel sorry for us for having unstable computers, most mac users find their computers rock solid.

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #4 –
Quote
If I ever felt sorry for Mac users, then it was because simply inserting a copy protected CD into their disc drive could make their whole system crash. That's a pathetic thing to do from the CD manufacturers, but on a Windows system that could never happen, right?

Wrong.

Get iTunes started and insert a copy proteced CD: iTunes stops responding and cannot be shut down. Launching another app fails and so does the shutdown - same behaviour via task manager. Only the power off button helped on my otherwise very stable Windows XP system.

As I wasn't even aware that I had a copy protected CD (never been an issue before, having used EAC and the Yamaha F1 drive) I am not sure what kind of copy protection it is. The CD is Ayumi Hamasaki's 'Rainbow'.

it uses CDS200. put it in a decent DVD-ROM drive and you can rip it for the most part. whether you have clicks or not is up to your drive

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #5 –
Quote
Quote
If I ever felt sorry for Mac users, then it was because simply inserting a copy protected CD into their disc drive could make their whole system crash. That's a pathetic thing to do from the CD manufacturers, but on a Windows system that could never happen, right?

Inserting a copy protected CD shouldn't make your computer crash, and I sincerely doubt that it ever would. However, in the worst case, it can make your CD-drive lock up and refuse to eject the CD. This is because Apple's CD-drives are made for CD's, and inserting anything else into them is at your own risk.

Please don't feel sorry for us for having unstable computers, most mac users find their computers rock solid.

heh, mac user are we?

i've grown quite familiar with them these last 4 semesters ~_~ (hell, i even got a slow G4 last spring to get "used" to the industry standard) and found them (or at least the apps i was using) to be (slightly) less stable than similar ones on the PC side... FCP 3 crashed 4-6 times on me, and even more for other students. flash mx crashed more on some computers than others in class, however i really haven't tried it at home. the one i spent the most time both on PC and Mac was Premier *cough* ... had a couple very frustrating crashes doing a simple "Ken Burns" photo slideshow on the mac side and 0 on the XP side (one almost locked, but i let it sit for 2-4 mins and it came back).

on my home G4, i've done several 28 hour MPEG-2 encodings only to come back to a frozen computer, however this might be due to some cheap (but not suspiciously so) PC133 memory. strange thing is it gets thru the encode but locks while the screensaver is running. and this is on the second to latest (but at least known to be stable) 10.2.6. haven't gotten around to installing Panther, yet

also the week-old-installs (kept fresh, thanks to deep freeze ) of the same, 10.2.6 have crashes-to-desktops while simply navigating folders and such on a third of the eMacs in the new mac lab.

anywho, point is more stable hasn't been my experience with OSX on 10 of the 12 or so machines i've worked with. and trust me, i put XP thru a lot more hell than i did these machines. (6-8 days between reboots; less than 5% free space on the OS partition; the entire time keeping 2 irc clients open, 1 fileserving, Opera and/or IE, UD, and running Photoshop, media players every day, and Cool Edit Pro and video encoders every couple days, and the occasional game)

oh, as for copy protected CDs crashing macs HARD, i haven't the foggiest why that would do anything, other than the OS really likes communicating with hardware on a really low level

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #6 –
I managed to crash iTunes just by pointing it at my MP3 collection! 
Dan

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #7 –
I can rip without a problem my CDS 200 CD with iTunes with either my Plextor (using a trick) or my TDK 440N DVD burner.

Plextor's trick is to launch PlexTools and set it to "Enable single session" before inserting the CD.

One thing I noticed, even for directly playing of the CD in iTunes the " Importing " option " Use error correction when reading Audio CDs " is functional.

But one thing I don't understand is why my Plextor PX-W4012A is so slow for ripping with iTunes with error correction. ( 0.6x )   

Same setting my DVD burner does around ( 5.0x )

One last thing, don't blame iTunes for a crash there, we're dealing with CD that don't respect the norm, and other apps had crash problems with them.

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #8 –
Quote
Inserting a copy protected CD shouldn't make your computer crash, and I sincerely doubt that it ever would.


It can easily, the two things from apple that run all the time - the iPod helper and the CD Ripper / Writer, these are system level services and could easily bring the system down (you cannot normally end task a service).
 

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #9 –
Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Services | (right click service) | Stop

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #10 –
I haven't crashed iTunes yet while ripping copy-protected CDs (key2audio and CDS300), but I have had GEAR, the importing/burning service, give me several blue screens of death out of the blue. As someone else said, GEAR will be iTunes' downfall.
Happiness - The agreeable sensation of contemplating the misery of others.

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #11 –
Quote
Inserting a copy protected CD shouldn't make your computer crash, and I sincerely doubt that it ever would.

Doubt no more - if you're unlucky you really can lock up your Mac, possibly to the point where you have to send it in for repairs, just by inserting a playback-protected audio disc.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106882

How To Crash Your PC Using iTunes

Reply #12 –
I copied (my own CD!!) Radioheads latest album wich is copy protected last night using iTunes 4.1 on a Powerbook 15" (the 1.25GHz one). It copied fine to AAC with no clicks pops, and certainly no system crash!!!!

Cheers,


Kristian