If you insert an audio CD in your optical disk drive, then Windows first detects it, then spins it up (so the data can be read continuously) and then starts playing it. But most of the time the audio CD is spun up at a very high speed which results in spinning noise coming from your CD drive and does not let you enjoy the music from the CD. After all you want to listen to the music or songs on the CD and not the spinning noise. Fortunately, there is a free software called RimHill that can set the spinning speed to a preset value, preventing Windows from spinning your disks at a very high speed.
The RimHill is a freeware program that sets the maximum optical disk speed to the specified level in your drive. This will prevent the annoying sound if a CD ROM is in your drive and also speeds up access time if the drive is rarely used. You can download RimHill from the website of the sz development. The download is a setup installer which can be used to install RimHill on your Windows PC.
After the installation, it places an icon in the system tray. If you click on this icon, you would see a menu from which you can select the default CD drive speeds. You can select the speeds from 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x and Maximum. By default the speed it set to 8x.
If you want to listen to audio CDs then you do not need very high speed and you can set it to 16x. If you want to copy data from the optical disks to your hard disk, or vice versa, then you need high speed and you should set the speed to Maximum. If you are doing nothing and the CD is staying idle in your optical drive, then you can set it to 8x or lower to reduce unnecessary disk spinning by Windows.
So if you are fretting about the sporadic noise emanating from your optical disk drive, then all you have to do is use RimHill and throttle the spin speed of your disks. Hopefully, now you would be able to enjoy your audio CDs without having to listen to the noise.
You can download RimHill from https://www.the-sz.com/products/rimhillex/.