CD Ripping Services Compared

RX8 writes "Designtechnica compares a number of CD ripping services and talks about the differences in services, price and which formats they will rip your music to. The guide compares 6 different services, all of which are somewhat different in what they do. Ripping services are gaining in popularity because they make it so easy to convert (a.k.a. rip) your entire collection into MP3 files for your portable media device."

Comments

Why pay for what you already have?

[User 956]

Why not just use one of the many P2P services available, and download MP3s of the CDs you already own?

Better yet (and less of a legal gray area), pay your 8-year old nephew $0.25 per disc to rip your music for you.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[urbanRealist]

Better yet, why not use Konqueror to both reply to your post, and rip mp3's?

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[ephex]

Better yet (and less of a legal gray area), pay your 8-year old nephew $0.25 per disc to rip your music for you.

Because we all know slashdotters don't get laid enough to have kids.

scratches

[nefarity]

Are there any services that will somehow magically correct the scratches on my CD's? Otherwise sending in my 300 disc collection is sort of worthless. (Guess who doesn't buy CD's anymore.)

Jesus H. Christ

[hunterx11]

I'm sorry if this sounds like flamebait, but for the amount of time and money people would spend to do this, why not just rip the damn CDs yourself? I mean, I understand that time is valuable, but if you have enough CDs that it would take a long time to rip them all, it would also cost a lot to use this service. I know for iTunes at least, you can have it automatically rip a CD when you insert it, and automatically eject when it's finished; you hardly have to pay attention at all. The tags might be a mess for less popular music, but that can easily be fixed up afterwards.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

this must be from the marketing guy who brought us bottled watter. i mean how does this pitch sound. well what we are going to do is provide a service that is easily obtained by the average person and charge them to let us do it. how do these work though? do you buy the cd and have it shipped to yourself care of the service where they will send you your mp3s after they rip them? sounds like a golden opertunity. now just buy the cds from the company and have them keep the actual disks as your back up and it would seem to work great. i wonder if they buy one copy of the cd and can sell you a share in the disk legally. you only get one track but if that is the only track you want it sure is a lot cheaper. as long as you dont send it out again you are not breaking the law right? and the company can just sell the other tracks to other people and only need to own the number of cds as the most popular track. sounds like a good venture to get into.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[shark72]

"I'm sorry if this sounds like flamebait, but for the amount of time and money people would spend to do this, why not just rip the damn CDs yourself?"

When I was 23, I scoffed at people who actually paid a CPA to do their taxes. Why not just do my damn taxes myself? And so I did.

Now that I have more money and less time, I see the benefit that CPAs offer. I let an expert handle it. Some of my friends do their taxes themselves. Either way is perfectly acceptable; I don't judge them, and they don't judge me.

Here are some of the reasons why somebody might use a CD ripping service:

• Like me, they've been buying CDs since the mid-80's, and have collections of several hundred CDs -- larger than that of the average Slashdotter.
• Like me, they have a lot of money than the average Slashdotter.
• Like me, they don't have a lot of time.

I've ripped most of mine with iTunes, just as you mentioned. But I can understand why this is not a worthwhile endeavor for many people.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[fossa]

I'm not familiar with the MP3.com details, but isn't that essentially what they wanted to do ang got sued for? Keep a master copy, then dole out to anyone who could prove they had the CD? So, borrow your friends' CDs before paying for this service... I guess this way you actually need a physical copy. I assume there were or would have been ways to cheat MP3.com's service.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

i suggest you employ someone at $15/hour to listen to your music for you. actually pay someone to breathe _instead_ of you, and post "i'm so important that I get paid way in excess of $15/hour" posts to slahdot.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct you actually need the physical CD.
MP3.com lost because the ripped MP3 did not come from your owned CD. Therefore, it was outside the Home Recording Act.
In MP3.com you put your CD in the drive and uploaded an ID to MP3.com. MP3.com checked their DB and let you have access to their version of the music on your CD. The point being "their version" not "your version". I know you could make "your version" bitwise identical to "thier version" but the HRA does say "their version" it essentially says "your version".

So, these ripping service demand your CDs. That way the MP3s produced are "your version" and covered by the Home Recording Act.

Now, as I said in anothe AC post ("Oh, to work for a ripping company") we all know that they liekly have a huge HD array full of previously ripped CDs and they just copy "their version" to you MP3 player. But, since they physically have your CDs and could actually, make "your version" of the MP3s, it is not blindly obvious that they break the HRA. So, the RIAA would have a much harder time proving that they are in copyright violation.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[MalusCaelestis]

While I personally wouldn't use one of these services, I completely understand the people who do use them. Just think of a fairly typical scenario.

Let's say you've got 400 CDs you want to rip. You've also got a fast computer with a DVD burner. Let's also say you want your music in VBR ~256kbps MP3. Decent quality but with files small enough that you won't need a SAN just to store it all (like you realized you'd need that one time you tried FLAC).

Assume it takes no time whatsoever to get a CD, put it in your computer, and let your ripping program query your favorite metadata server. But you still want to check the accuracy of the song titles and other information (you remember the last time you tried this and relied on CDDB, only to realize after you were done that one in every five tracks was misspelled or completely wrong). Let's say it takes one minute to confirm the accuracy of the metadata and make any corrections.

Now, like I said, you've got a fast computer. So you can rip a CD in about five minutes. Add to that the one minute per disc to check the metadata accuracy and you're looking at six minutes per CD. Good! That's 10 per hour. OK, you've got 400 CDs and you can do 10 an hour. That'll only take you... hrm--I never was any good at math--carry the six, divide by pi... 40 hours. Oh. That's a full time job for a week! Dang.

Well, you've got a decent job designing widgets. You make about $40 an hour (a little over $80k per year). Which means that every CD you're ripping is worth about $4.00 in time--and you're giving up two full weeks of free time, or maybe taking a week of vacation time. This doesn't sound so fun anymore. But your loving wife just bought you an iPod for Christmas and you'd hate to let it go to waste. Couldn't you just pay someone to do it for you? I mean, you're busy. You've got a wife and, oh, let's say seven kids (you're Catholic). You just don't have that kind of time in the evenings and you just spent your vacation time on a nice, long cruise to Alaska.

Oh, and your wife makes the best meatloaf. She serves it with this incredible sauce that her mother taught her to make. At least that lousy in-law of yours was good for something! This week she cooked it too long, though. It was dry and tough. It was harder to swallow than that worm your friends dared you to eat when you were 12. Those were the times...

But I digress.

Without hesitating, you hit that Purchase button and this place sends you a few empty spindles in a box. You just stick on the provided label and send it back to them with all your CDs inside. Early next week your discs return along with a smaller spindle of DVDs containing all your music. (Excellent! Now when your hard drive crashes, like it did last year, you won't have to spend another $400 to get everything ripped again.) You copy the files to your hard drive. It takes about an hour and a half total. You copy the songs to your iPod and put your DVDs in the safe next to your father's pocketwatch and that original 1977 Darth Vader doll--ACTION FIGURE!!!--sorry, action figure--that your wife keeps asking you to sell but you have to remind her will be worth more money in another 10 years. Secretly, though, you still love Star Wars (not those new pieces of junk--though that newest one wasn't so bad--but the original... you just called it Star Wars, none of this "A New Hope" or "Episode IV" nonsense) and you just couldn't stand to sell it. And besides, does she need to nag you about it every week? I mean, she's a great woman, but can't she just let it go? It's not like it's hurting anyone. You let her keep that ragged old stuffed bear she had as a child. It's filthy and it smells (can't she just throw it in the washer?) but she keeps it on her side of the bed. She still sleeps with it sometimes. What's up with that? I mean, she's 45 years old, married, and the mother of seven children, for crying out loud! You've been thinking about talking to her about it. Maybe she needs to see a shrin

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[elmegil]

And you plan to listen to all 500 of them the week after that? Give me a break. What do you do at home when you want to listen to a CD? You go over to the case, put the CD in the player. What do I do when I want to listen to a CD? I go over to the case, put the CD in the ripper. Not one iota of difference.

There is no way you need your entire collection instantaneously. So all these "I have better things to do with my time" people just don't seem to be using their brains about how they're likely to use that MP3 player.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Macdude]

Now, like I said, you've got a fast computer. So you can rip a CD in about five minutes. Add to that the one minute per disc to check the metadata accuracy and you're looking at six minutes per CD. Good! That's 10 per hour. OK, you've got 400 CDs and you can do 10 an hour. That'll only take you... hrm--I never was any good at math--carry the six, divide by pi... 40 hours. Oh. That's a full time job for a week! Dang.

Once you start the RIP you just get on with whatever it was you were doing on the computer in the first place. Then a little while later you take a micro-break (gotta avoid that carpal tunnel) you change discs and repeat.

And?

[netkid91]

People are really THAT LAZY these days they cannot rip the damn CD's themselves???
Having a company rip a CD for you: $10
Amount of time it would take you to do it yourself: 5 minutes
Knowing you paid money for something you could do in the time it takes to mastubate without paying: Pricless
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else there is /.

price?what?

[EngMedic]

Cdex : http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos

for windows systems, it's all you need. otherwise:
#!/bin/bash
cdparanoia -B;
for files in *.wav; do lame -b $files; done;
rm *.wav;
easytag &
done

Silence, Nerds!

[Quaoar]

Believe it or not, there ARE people out there with legitimate, 500+ CD collections who would rather not repeat the process of:

A. Ripping the CD.
B. Fixing the tags.
C. Applying album art.
D. Sorting the music properly.

...500 times!

I'm not saying that I would use it (I personally like organizing my collection, it's fun for me), but I could see how someone with a large music collection would be willing to pay for such a service.

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[fmaxwell]

That said, your workflow is pretty bad. Anyone with that large of a collection should just set up program(s) for one-click extraction and tagging.

If only it were that easy!

The sad reality is that the freedb and cddb databases are filled with crap. Song and album titles are inconsistently capitalized. There are spelling errors. One person will refer to a two CD collection as "Disk 1" and "Disk 2" while another will call it "CD 1" and "CD 2." One person will classify the genre of The Who as "Rock" while others will classify it as "Classic Rock," "Blues", or "Hard Rock." Some people will refer to the artists as "Who, The" while others will write "The Who" and "Who." On top of that, there will be multiple hits per CD, many with the inconsistencies listed above, but others for different albums that happen to match at to the algorithm that interprets which CD is in the drive. Album cover art has to be scrounged from various sources around the net. It's all really ugly.

CD ripping? it's the LPs I want ripped!

[ynohoo]

Title says it all, really. Altho I still have alot of CDs to rip...

Never heard of these

[Jerf]

I've never heard of these services before. It's a fairly safe assumption a lot of other people haven't either.

If you want to use one of these services, I'd recommend doing it sooner rather than later. The lawsuit, based on the my.mp3.com precedent is inevitable, and I'd expect the ripping services to lose. I don't think the courts are going to fail to see this as distribution, if what my.mp3.com was doing was "distribution". The only difference is really transmission method.

Especially as it's a safe bet at least one of them doesn't really rip each time, but instead pulls it from the "cache" whenever possible, removing the last difference from my.mp3.com other than transmission method.

Note, I'm not saying I want them shut down; I think my.mp3.com was perfectly ethical, though the legality is at best dubious. Personally, I don't think you can "distribute" something to somebody who already has it, but I can see how reasonable people differ. (Though I think my opinion is more rational going forward.) I just think that based on the precedent, the ripping services would lose, especially as it will be easy to paint every dollar these services make as something the copyright holder should have gotten (even though they don't offer this service; copyright law doesn't care), which is the Big No-No of copyright law, the whole reason it exists.

Cost effective - hire someone else!

[NotQuiteReal]

There are a lot of threads about the cost. "do it yourself", "you're lazy", "costs too much".

Well, my friends, there are people on the worlds who value their time at more than $60USD per hour... these services offer ripping services for about $1 a disc, and since YOU can't rip them faster than 1 per minute (it would probably take you about 5 minutes each, be honest), it is a BARGAIN to send them off and have someone else do it.

Lots of people don't wash their own car, clean their own house, etc.

Just shut up - economies work by people paying others what a fair price for services rendered. If your time is not worth $1 for 5mins work, then don't use these services.

Also bear in mind there are lots of folks (call them "users", get my drift) who haven't a clue how to go about getting CDEX or some such.

Chill out.

Problems and Scratches

[fncll]

Having over 2000 CDs I can see the attraction with these services-- but how many of them rip and encode and tag the files properly? I've slowly been converting my whole collection and it's time consuming to do it right-- I don't mean dropping the disc in iTunes, but EAC with error correction and checksum verification + LAME APS + proper file naming + full tagging (or completely proofread tags normalized to the way I want my whole collection). The only people I've found that meet all my specs are my kids-- and their services don't come cheap...

re: scratches-- Brasso can clean just about any reasonable scratches off of a disc... the only thing better is an actual resurfacing unit, which'll set you back another $2500 or so. Throw those disc doctors and other pieces of crap in the trash where they belong.

Re:As a record store owner

[ajservo]

Did you ever stop to think that not selling popular music is why your store is failing?

Last I heard shock artists and cop killers were selling pretty well.

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/charts/chart_displa y.jsp?g=Singles&f=Pop+100

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

I have Alesis M1 Active Mk2 studio monitors, and they really bring out the compression artifacts. On my PDA, home stereo, and car 192kps is perfect, but anything below 320k I swear I hear the difference on my studio monitors (and with 320 it sounds great, but I notice a slight loss of stereo with my studio headphones). Perhaps I'm a freak, or maybe it is just placebo, but either way FLAC cures the problem.

Of that, I have no doubt. For general purposes though I would bet Vorbis at q6 would definitely be sufficient. I'm sure you can hear the washout on studio monitors. I never really understood what the big deal was when everyone was downloading 128k MP3's. How could media companies have ever felt threatened by that noise?

My Time

[owslystnly]

I think these services are a good idea. I am living in Europe for ~2yrs and I dont want to carry my whole cd collection over here with me, and I also dont have a reliable internet connection. So, when I am home for 3 weeks, and I would rather not spend my time off ripping my whole CD collection, it is certainly worth a few $ to have somebody do it for me in a few days.

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