Mini-Review: Roxio / Sonic Solutions CD Spin Doctor

I may as well just say it up front: This is the most unreliable, crash-prone, unstable, frustrating, piece of crap application on my computer. If it weren't for the fragility of the application, it would be a good tool for what it's designed for (easily digitizing vinyl or taped albums and easily splitting them into separate tracks that are added to the iTunes library). But although it does what it promises when it works, the fatal flaw is that it crashes if you look at it wrong, which means you have to save your progress after every click or two, and force quit the app many times as you proceed. It's just atrocious, and Roxio's support forums seem to have no answer; the app feels like abandonware. It is bundled with Toast and with the ADS Instant Music analog audio capture box that I bought at Macworld Expo.

On the positive side, if one were to pretend that the application did not crash, and just look at the UI and workflow, it's nice and clean and simple with only a few real flaws. The process is straightforward: (flaws noted in italics)

1. Create a new recording session. (Input settings are not remembered across launches of the app, so you must select the USB device each time, click the "Play Input Through Speakers" each time so that you can monitor the recording, etc. And with the constant crashing, you may need to re-launch for each recording.)
2. Click the record button.
3. Click the stop button when the end of the album is reached. Alternatively you can set a time limit from a limited number of predefined time intervals.
4. Click the Auto Define magic wand button to auto-locate the individual tracks based on dead space between them.
5. Tweak the track endpoints. (There is insufficient zoom-in resolution to nail down the start and end points with quite enough accuracy, so you end up with a split-second of dead air before a track starts and after it ends. In addition, the track boundary is partially obscured by a pretty drop-shadow, which makes it harder to see where the boundary really is. And if you play the audio, this is where the app is so eager to freeze up, so it is a painfully frustrating and slow process to adjust the track boundary and then listen to see if it correct.)
6. Edit the track names. (As will be seen in the next step, it turns out this often causes the iTunes export to fail, so don't bother.)
7. Click the iTunes button to send the tracks to iTunes. (If you gave the tracks names with certain non-alphanumeric characters, the export will fail without saying why. Since it is so common to have apostrophes, hyphens, commas, etc. in track names, the track naming feature is rendered useless. You have to do all that in iTunes, whose interface for it is better anyway. But that introduces more pain into the process in iTunes, because it forces you to do each side of an album separately; otherwise you get two of each track title (e.g., "Untitled Track 01") and you may have to listen and look at the record sleeve to identify out which is from which side of the album. The export conversion selection is either MP3 or AAC (the default is AAC), but you have no choice of bit rate, and the setting is not remembered later. So if you want to create MP3s you must remember to select it every time, or you will wind up with AAC files.)
8. Finally, in iTunes, edit the track names and go find some album art. (The Spin Doctor program is arrogant enough to contaminate each of your tracks' metadata comment field with an advertisement that the track was created by Spin Doctor. So you will want to delete those.)

So there you have it. A useful program with a good workflow, utterly destroyed by total unreliability.

The recording dialog box.

The main window, where you define tracks.