Has anyone experienced choppy sound problems encoding recently purchased CDs? I have been using iTunes to do my encoding on the Mac and it has been working fine, but recently I have been getting slightly rough sounding rips with a choppy quality to them. Is this perhaps due to some copy protection scheme incorporated into modern CDs? If I rip the audio off the questionable CDs using Astarte CD Copy for the Mac, and then encode with iTunes, the choppiness is gone. I have so far only experienced this with the Creed Weathered CD and the Men at Work Contraband CD, both of which I purchased within the last month or so.

I don't think copy protection is the problem you're having. If the CDs were copy protected, they would most likely not rip at all.

Sometimes you just get CDs that are hard to rip. Or, maybe, your ripping system has been working poorly all along and you've only just noticed it on those CDs. Try ripping them on another computer (or, as you discovered, with a different piece of software). More information in the FAQ.