Hi James, Does "no joy" mean that playing the Audio CD from a test account did not work, or that the new account had the same problems that yours did? Can you play music from a data disc written from iTunes?
The part about a corrupted plist file only applied in my case because: (1) booting from a completely different disk with the same operating system (i.e. the one at the Apple Store) showed no problems with the CD drive. (I had already tried booting from my last backup, but it showed similar problems.) (2) trying to play from a newly created test account on my own computer worked perfectly well. Part (1) meant that there was no intrinsic hardware problem with my computer CD drive. (I don't know whether you have a friend with a compatible Mac installation or cloned backup to disk running the same operating system as you do.) Notice that I couldn't use one of my backups to test this effectively. Part (2) meant that I had to fix something in my account. I would try to do these checks before going to the store. As it is, you may be able to solve these problems with an archive and install, but I'd run checks before trying to do this. I also would try general maintenance actions like running Disk Utility to repair permissions. (Shift-Command-U to get to the Utilities folder). When you start up Disk Utility you'll have to VO-keys down arrow and interact with the outline to select your hard drive. You want to go to "First Aid" with item chooser. (It's probably set with this option selected). There will be buttons to "Verify Disk" and "Repair Disk". I simply run "Repair Disk" since if the Verification comes back with messages to repair your disk you have to run "Repair Disk" anyway, and it doesn't take much more time than running "Verify". Various report messages come up when t he repair operations are run about things that the system finds. You can use the arrow keys to read these sections. If you were only having problems importing audio CDs (rather than playing them) I would guess that it was a permissions problem and that you didn't have write privileges on the Music folder. But since you can't play the Audio CDs, but can use your drive with data discs it seems distinctly bizarre. I'd probably see if I can burn an iTunes data disc of music and play that before getting more help. This sounds like a systems software problem, and general maintenance programs and cache cleaners are probably in order. Sorry to have this sound so sketchy but I have family visiting who just arrived. Hope this helps. Report back any details. Cheers, Esther On Dec 19, 2007, at 01:41PM, James Austin wrote: >Hi Esther, > >I have tried what you suggested, and no joy unfortunately. > >I deleted the preferences from the "library" folder of the system and >the "preferences" folder of my home folder. It had no effect. > >Do you have any other ideas short of me taking it into it to the store? > >Thanks again > >Best Wishes > >James > > >
