Bugs & Fixes: Spin Doctor, Heal thyself

04.12.2009
I am of a certain age--the age where I have a collection of vinyl LPs acquired years ago. Every so often, I get the urge to transfer some of my favorite LPs to my Mac. To do so, I connect a turntable to a USB port on my Mac, using . To make recordings, I have used (acquired as part of Toast 10 Titanium).

The main appeal of Spin Doctor for me, over other audio recording software that I own, is that it automatically divides a recording into tracks, so that each individual song on an album is easily ready to be labelled and transferred to iTunes.

Unfortunately, Spin Doctor's appeal has been limited by numerous bugs that have plagued the software over the years. The most frustrating ones involve saving files. In older versions, the program would more than occasionally crash the first time I attempted to save a file. When I re-opened Spin Doctor, all the recorded data was, of course, gone, as it had never been saved. Still, with a bit of luck, and remembering to save early and often, I was usually able to make it through a session successfully.

Things have taken a turn for the worse with the latest version of Spin Doctor, especially when running under Snow Leopard. Almost every time I now try to save a file, it is "truncated." In one instance, all but the first 5 minutes of a 30-minute recording vanished. In another case, all but 2 seconds of a 12-minute recording disappeared! These errors happened even before an attempt at defining tracks.

A search of the Web revealed others complaining of the same issue--such as in at the Roxio Community Forums. The most commonly suggested work-around is to use the Save a Copy As command, rather than Save or Save As. This does usually work for me, at least to prevent the truncating of the file. But I still have problems when I attempt to export the data to iTunes (again, ). A similarly summarizes these complaints. Contacting Roxio for help has not led to a solution, according to these online postings. I too have been unable to get the matter resolved.