March of the Falsettos

First the good news, it appears that the Triumph of Love CD copied just fine. It's a superb CD, everyone does a fantastic job, particularly Susan Egan. It took me about half the CD to realize where I'd heard her voice before; as Belle on the Beauty and the Beast Broadway cast album. The score is gorgeous, it's too bad it didn't last longer, although to be fair, the plot synposis is confusing as hell, which I'm sure had something to do with its brief run.

On to the more perplexing issue, the March of the Falsettos CD still wouldn't copy using Music Match on my work computer. I was able to get it to ek out the second track, but it crapped out on the third, and wouldn't even try any of the the other tracks no matter what I did. However, it gave me a different error message than the Music Match on my home computer, saying it wasn't compatible with the .cda format, which I don't quite understand how that's possible. So, I tried copying it with Windows Media Player. WMP only copies into wma tracks, which I'm not thrilled about, but beggars can't be choosers. I didn't look up the CD information on the chance that maybe there was something about the title or the long track names with "/"'s in them that confounded MM, so it copied as Uknown Album by Unknown Artist, with Unknown Track 1, Unknown Track 2, and so on. It made it through copying all 13 tracks, but when I opened up My Documents, the Unknown Artist folder contained 30 Unknown Album folders. One folder contained tracks 1-9, another contained tracks 10-13, and the remaining 28 were empty. I deleted the 28 empty folders and randomly clicked on a track in the folder containing tracks 1-9 to see how well it copied, and the result was not well at all. There was skipping, popping, static, it was really abysmal, and I copied it at 128 kbps. However, the disc plays fine either in the computer disc drive or in my CD player. I cannot figure out why it won't copy. I did a quick search online to see if anyone else has had this issue but couldn't find anything. I've got one more chance with MM on my laptop, which will sometimes copy discs better than my desktop computer, although sometimes worse (my desktop uses Windows 98 and MM 3.0 while the laptop has XP and MM 6.0, so I often retry CD's on the laptop if they don't copy well onto the desktop computer because of scratches or other problems, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't). If it doesn't work, I'm going to have to do an audio capture which I dislike. I have to play the entire CD in real time, so I have to have the free time to do that, any skips or other interference get recorded, and then I have to burn the massive WAV file as a CD to create the individual tracks, then copy that CD into mp3's, which takes forever, especially if the WAV file is particularly large and needs to be cut into several tracks. Then, CD-R's don't always copy as well in Music Match, even if the surface is flawless, it's still possible to get some skips or static. I really don't have the time to do all that right now, and probably won't until after I'm back from New York. Then after doing all that, I'll need to listen to the mp3 files to make sure they copied ok, so I'll need another free hour or so for that. I'm totally perplexed as to why it won't copy. I've only had this happen a couple of other times before, and it's been either because the CD was copy protected, in which case I just ejected it and reinserted it while holding CTRL, and then it copied fine, or the other problem was a Czech CD and the title of one of the track titles contained an unrecognizable character, and MM would crap out on that track because it couldn't write the character to the hard drive, so I just copied the rest of the disc and then copied that track by just naming it the track number and that took care of the problem. This perplexes me, all the track names are in English, the disc is too old to be copy protected (and the second CD copied just fine), and the surface only has a couple of light scratches, I've copied CD's in much worse shape that turned out just fine. Has anyone else had this problem? The final option would be to see if I can purchase a digital version of the CD, but that's kind of a waste since I already paid for this one. However, as I was browsing to see if anyone else had this problem, one of the results was Buy March of the Falsettos on emusic. Of course, the new internet filters wouldn't let me go to that search result, so I'll have to look it up when I go home, but I believe emusic sells its files as mp3's without DRM, so if it's less than $10 I may just do that. Plus, I already have Four Jews in a Room Bitching and I Never Wanted To Love You on other compilations, so I'd only have to buy 11 tracks. I'll keep you updated on what happens. Hopefully Coco and The Act won't have this problem. In seven years this is the first time I've been so stumped, I don't like it.