Fast CD ripping on old MacBook Pro, slow ripping on i5 PC? I'm ripping my entire music collection into ALAC, as it's the best solution for quality and compatibility across all devices in our household. In order to speed the ripping process up, I have iTunes installed on my PC and Apple laptop with the same ripping settings (ALAC, error correction enabled), with the aim to merge the two local libraries later. The issue I have is, the Windows PC is extremely slow compared to the laptop, despite having the power advantage.

Any ideas what could be causing this? I the DVD-RW drive in the PC (Samsung SH-224DB) is capable of reading at 40x but it's clearly not even close. From what I have read, the SuperDrive in my laptop is only 20x~.

I'm almost tempted to convert the computer into a temporary 'Hackintosh' to see if there is any difference.

Screenshots of ripping progress
Installed Mavericks on the same, slow ripping PC onto a USB external drive. After adjusting one or two kexts, I had a mostly functional OS X environment.

Updated and ran iTunes with the same settings. Ripping is now mostly at 20x on the same CD drive. Looks to be a limitation with iTunes for Windows, or Windows itself. Who knows!