Why Does It Take So Long For My Xbox 360 To Start Ripping A CD?

What is the condition of the disk? If the disk is highly scratched it might be having difficulty reading it. Have you tried other music disks just to rule out the disk.

Video games run fine from the disc. When I want to rip a CD it takes from 15 to 20 minutes to start ripping the first track and when it does, the rest of the tracks rip as normal.

Sounds like a drive problem. Are you able to play games with ease? Or is it just the CD ripping? Also, what kind of CD are you ripping? How big is each song? I know ripping CDs take quite a while sometimes, a whole CD for me can take a while, maybe 15 minutes,
but it does sound weird that it takes that long for one song.

This also happens from brand-new CD's.

i have a querstion and a suggestion.

question - was your xbox working fine before this and if so were there any signs of your xbox slowing down before all this happened?

suggestion - this may have been because of the recent update, as i also had this problem where EVERYTHING literally took forever to load, and when i finally wa sable to get into live everything was slow and laggy and unresponsive. basicvally i ended up getting
a whole new xbox, but what i can suggest to you is that if you have any other haddrive around try deleting your profile from your current hdd then recovering it on theother hdd and sign in, if it takes the same amount of time to sign in as the other it could
be something wrong the profile which i would highly doubt as profiles have little to no data to really corrupt and are easily fixed by deleting and recovering.