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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."
I'd be interested to see how the sound quality compares if the CDs are scratched. Given that many people won't be sending in new discs, this should be an important factor.
I'm currently in the process of ripping my 400+ CD's to FLAC - not MP3. If there was a service that would provide a lossless codec, I might be interested in saving the time. Even then, I doubt it though. It's just not that difficult, or time-consuming, to do it yourself. I mean, gRip runs in the background just fine while surfing for por^W^W^Wworking.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
I wonder if companies like these could make their operations more efficient by caching the rips of their customers so the same CD need not be done twice. Sadly, the lessons of my.mp3.com should discourage them from anything like that.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
For one thing, ripping an entire CD collection in a row is a great way to ruin your CD drive. Those things have moving parts and they heat up real fast, especially in laptops. I even ruined my desktop's CD drive this way. For another thing, the ripping company only has to rip one copy of each CD and then they store it on a server. So you are basically just showing them that you own the CD and then they give you a legal copy digitized in your format of choice. It is a pretty sweet deal if you think about it.
Some of them offer FLAC, and send it back on DVDs, so you would have an additional hardcopy of all your tunes incase something ever happened. I would have considered this if it was a bit cheaper, and may be worth it for professionals that don't have hours to burn their entire collection.
I know I can do it myself, but I've already ripped my entire collection at 128 mp3 (yes I was stupid), then 320 mp3, and THEN I found out about FLAC and figured it would be good to have a lossless backup of everything. However, I really don't feel like burning everything over again. I guess I'll just take and weekend and do it all over again (it'd be just as much of a hassle to ship everything, wait awhile, then pick it up [UPS/Fedex NEVER leaves anything at my apartment]).
At these prices, you can sign up for a subscription with allopmp3.com or mp3search.ru or any of these other "quasi-legal" sites and download full albums for $1.00-$1.50
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Call it flame bait, but what's wrong with Windows Media Player 10? Toss in a CD, switch to the RIP tab, turn off the DRM option and rip to MP3 or WMA. It automaticly grabs the artist, title, song list, and cover art and puts the whole thing together for you. My P4 540 chews through an album in no time, and works fine in the back ground. I have next to no time to waste ripping, but I managed to get through a quarter of my collection (over 200 discs) taking the time to select which songs to rip and which albumns to grab in and hour or so.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
No US firm can do a rip at less than a dollar per CD and remain financially sustainable in the long run.
:(
Recently I spoke with a bunch of folks interested in doing this out of India ( ie. outsourcing CD-ripping)
Pros:
1. CD to mp3 at 5 cents per CD. ( Most US firms charge around $1 per CD)
2. Audio Casette to mp3 at 10 cents per tape. ( Most US firms charge upwards of $5 per tape)
Tascam makes a decent cassette->CD converter
Cons:
Shipping. This isn't Java code you can "ship over the wire". Packaging CDs + courier costs + potential damages + Customs duties at port of entry bring the costs back to a dollar per CD
btw, the Audio Cassette to mp3 market is much more lucrative within India, & for Indian immigrants abroad( roughly 2 million Indian immigrants in USA, 1.5 mil in UK ). An average Bollywood movie has 6 songs. About 800-900 films released per year, mostly music available in audio tapes only. Old Bollywood films ( 1980s & earlier ) are exclusively on audiotape. That means the average Indian household has 100s of audiotapes lying around. The mp3 market in India is exploding, mp3 players available dirt-cheap
Last I counted, I have 375+ audio cassettes waiting to be converted to mp3, & I'm not even a hardcore Bollywood fan!
I used RipDigital (yes, I could do it myself; no, I didn't) and while it was mostly useful, I still spent a lot of time fixing the tags. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is annoyed by the inconsistency in the Gracenote DB. Sometimes it's "J.S. Bach", sometimes it's "Johann Sebastian Bach", and sometimes it's "Bach, J.S.". Nine Inch Nails albums are variously classified as rock, alternative/punk, and electronica.
I found myself wishing that RipDigital had built a local version of the DB with consistent artist names, album titles, song titles, genres, etc., adding new CDs as customers submit them for ripping. In other words, check local DB and if absent, use Gracenote to get the initial data, scan the tags for format, make edits as necessary, and insert into local DB for future. Sure, it would have meant a little extra work at the outset, but pretty soon they would get to the point where each new customer was only requiring them to manually check the formatting on a handful of CDs, and the finished product would be so much cleaner.
What kind of cheap-ass drives do you use? Much to my disappointment, the non-techies in my office have been playing audio CD's on their PCs 8 hours a day, every day, for the last eight years, and never ruined a drive.
I ripped my 300 audio CDs in two days: no problems. Before I had an external CD drive for backups, I would *burn* nearly 60 CDs in a row and never had problems either.
If actually using your CD drive for it's intended purposes ruins it, you should probably replace it with a non-defective part. I've never seen any warranty disclaimer that would prevent you from returning it.
"I can't install EQ2! Reading 10 CD's in a row will ruin my drive!"
Wait and see. The RIAA will send them a blank CD with an authentic-looking label, then sue when they get back the music that should have been there :)
If you have 500 CDs, I could understand giving it a break every once in a while. But for someone that has 50 CDs, I would return that CD drive for not being able to play 50 CDs, even if in a row at 100% throughput. Besides, the CD drive isn't going to be running the entire time, as it must take some time to encode the files as well. I did a test on a 13 track CD, roughly 565MB, and it took 2 minutes to copy it to the HDD. Assuming very good and consistent encoding speeds, figure at another minute, figure 30 seconds to change out CDs, enter any dialog information, etc. So, the CD-ROM is only going to be doing any work about 60% of the time, and that's if you are a machine, pumping in CD's non stop. But, I think the average person with an average person's collection and not rushing will do just fine on their own.
I'm sure its a bit more intensive than simply playing a CD on repeat all day, as you're only copying the full CD about once an hour, but it should be well within the limitations of modern CD players to handles a few hours of reading. If the drive is still overheating, there are ways to solve this problem.
In a desktop: first try moving the drive away from any other drives it may be touching or close to. If it is in the top slot, move it to the next one down to allow room for heat to escape on top. To speed cooling, put a drive cooler in the slot above the drive. Also, pull the back of the desktop off the floor and away from walls. Having your fan plugged up by carpet fibers or blocked by the wall will increase drive heat. If the problem is drastic, pull the drive out completely and set a small fan to blow on it directly. Make sure to set it on something that will allow air to flow beneath the drive.
In a laptop: Make sure there is airflow beneath the laptop. Most laptops allow a tiny amount of room. Anyone who carries their laptop around can tell you that leaving it on a cushion or carpet will cause it to overheat rather quickly. So, increase cooling by increasing airflow. You can also buy a "cold plate" to set the laptop on, to ensure that its sucking up nice cool air.
If it's still overheating, I'd move to a desktop. Ripping on a flimsy (and probably slower) laptop drive would just get annoying. If the desktop is still overheating, be it CPU/HDD/CD-ROM... seriously look at getting a new computer. If CD ripping is what brings down the box, then the box wasn't very great to begin with.
I8-D
That reminds me of when I decided to rip all of my CDs. I had just built a new computer, and decided that was the time to rip all my CDs being that my new computer had the needed storage and could complete the task in a reasonable amount of time. So I went about ripping my hundreds of CDs on my brand new DVD drive. Several days later of insert, rip, and repeat whenever I was using the computer - and I was done. So I decided to watch a DVD, at which point I discovered that the DVD drive couldn't read DVDs! It still read CD's, but after trying several DVDs with no luck, I RMA'd the drive and got a new one. So that's my story of how I ripped all my music without ending up with a worn out drive. Though, I really have no idea if ripping all those CDs ended up killing the drive, or it was just defective to begin with.
I don't know about other countries but in the UK petty mail theft is very common, especially around this time of year. I've had mail ripped open by postal chavs trying to see if there is any money in them there Christmas cards, which of course there isn't :P
I also used to be a member of a Netflix style film rental service. They used rather conspicuous packaging for returning films. After the 3rd film went 'missing' i was charged for the disc. Needless to say i canceled my membership. I now borrow films from elsewhere.
Needless to say if they think I'm going post them several hundred high cost CD's they really ought to know better.
Oh and insurance rarely pays out for the full value of the goods stolen.
What do they use to rip the CDs? Do they encode them with LAME? Do they run them through mp3gain for you? What is the quality of the final output? This comparison seems only to compare options, not the final product. Too bad.