Maybe I'm doing it wrong, or maybe it's just the file size??? I have an older sony laptop that was top of the line in 2005 that works pretty nice most of the time. I am using itunes and noticed that my cpu usage is pretty high. Especially just scrolling at normal speed on a web site while listening to itunes, the music skips a little with each scroll. Pretty annoying. So I'm using itunes, an external hard drive and apple lossless. All my updates are good, like this latest one a few days back that really changed the look and everything. So I even tried foobar2000 today and the cpu usage actually went up quite a bit. I'm almost ready to go back to CDs, but I got a fancy WFS uDAC hooked up and wired how I like it. I also have a new laptop coming in the mail, but I don't want more of this. My main question is; am I using more cpu just because of the lossless or if having an external hard drive is the problem?? Now that I have 77gb of lossless converted, I'm wondering if another encoder would do me better with the foobar too? Though it's running smooth now and I don't mind Itunes or the SQ, I really don't want to do a lot of manual naming of files if I try another ripping program.