I know some of my short albums with medium-length songs (10mins and more) will only import at 5x whereas something with shorter songs (4 - 6 mins) goes about 10-15x speed.
CDs aren't like records in that the music is literally spaced onto the disc, they're files that are read by a laser. It's the same reason some files take longer to download than others- file size varies per item.
It can also completely depend on how your computer feels that second. If you're running any other small processes, even if its just something running in the background that you don't realize, one CD might take a little longer.
Well... I of course realize a longer album takes more time... I'm talking about the speed at which they import relative to the length (at least I think that's what it is).
Even if you have two songs that are both exactly 3:00 long, they could still be different file sizes simply due to how they were recorded, put on the CD, how many tracks there are on the final master, etc etc...the list goes on and on. It just depends per song, there isn't one standard.
There's something weird about the way iTunes rips. The songs sounded less punchy - whereas if I used Rip or EAC (on my old laptop) I'd get a better sound.
Eh, whatever. Far as I'm concerned ripping into lossless for your computer isn't worth it for me anyway, who cares if its lossless if I don't have exceptional speakers to play it out of?
"It's also good to be able to burn CDs for people from lossless files, so that they won't suffer double compression. And of course... it's the way to have good backups if a CD breaks!"
I have never once broken a CD ever in my entire life.
And I honestly believe that through computer speakers, you're hearing a placebo effect of the sound. But hey, if that's what you wanna do, you technically do have a pretty identical replica if anything ever happened to the CD.
Though I've owned plenty of albums digitally and still re-bought hard copies. It just feels right.