CD disappears when try to import into iTunes

Question

Hello,
I have a macbook pro that I bought in April 2008. It has the following problem:
Upon inserting a CD, iTunes comes up, identifies the tracks and then asks if I want to import it. When I click yes, the CD usually instantaneously disappears from itunes. To get it back, I have to eject it and re-insert it. Then when it asks, once again, if I want to import it, it always succeeds with no problems whatsoever.
This is pretty bizarre behavior. I wonder if anyone else has ever seen it or has any ideas. This has continued to happen through a number of OS X releases, including 10.6.2.

Answer 1

Hi gary, yes, I'm using 10.6.2 and iTunes 9.02 myself, and it works perfectly for me, but I've seen others with serious cases of this problem with various versions of OSX and iTunes, though I have never suffered it myself on any of our family's half a dozen currently operational Macs.
Your follow up post brought back a few more memories about the issue.
A friend of mine suffered it extremely severely under Tiger and Leopard too and iTunes 7 etc. 90% of the time the disc would disappear when accessing CDDB on first insertion. Again even "clean installs" didn't seem to fix it (though on occasion people would find it worked for the first CD read, but not for subsequent ones - suggesting a problem of corruption of the database when the data relating to the first CD was written for some reason) . Somehow, though, it doesn't affect most people, which makes it unlikely that it is a straight iTunes/OS problem.
Other theories over the years have involved problems in reading the disc identifier information on the CD for some reason related to the drive concerned, issues with proxy servers used by some ISPs, the use of third party "plug-ins" , conflicts with other software, you name it. None of it really seems to stack up to me. One suggestion that might be more probable involves the way that iTunes deals with the "Mount point" of the CD concerned, as Denis Lynch noted in another thread a year or so back:
I did find a geeky workaround: the problem is that when iTunes gets the track names from CDDB, it wants to change the volume mount point for the CD from "Audio CD" to the album name. Apparently the unmount goes fine, but the mount falls on the floor.
If you open Disk Utility in that situation, you'll see that it shows an unmounted Audio CD. Right click (Control-click if you only have one button), and select the option to mount the volume. It mounts with the iTunes-approved title, and iTunes immediately starts importing the CD.
So if you've got a stack of CDs to import, just leave Disk Utility open to deal with the ones that get "stuck."
One solution that I now remember people suggesting in earlier incarnations of this issue, and which appears to have worked for some, was to head to iTunes preferences and change the settings for "When you insert a CD" to "Import CD and Eject" from whatever it was currently set to. Seemed to work for some . Might be worth a try?
If you want to have a look at some of the "history" under earlier OS and iTunes versions of this issue take a look at the very long archived thread starting at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6045368
Cheers
Rod