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

The real question is....

[Chris Bradshaw]

Will it grab the rootkit too?

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?

[ploss]

This makes it easier. Also, you can rip all of your CDs to lossless (which can be a lot harder to find on P2P networks and takes longer to download.)

This seems like a really great idea for a holiday gift for a friend or relative with lots of older CDs or stuff that may be harder to find on P2P. Just get them like a 100-CD gift certificate and they are shipped back DVDs or even an external hard drive with all of their music, album covers, and correctly labeled songs. An MP3 jukebox would be a great way to rekindle interest in CDs that are currently sitting on shelves collecting dust, and would make a cool gift for anyone who likes music.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[StikyPad]

There's not much grey area, at least in the US, especially when you consider that many P2P clients will share out, at the very least, the files you downloaded unless you specifically take measures to prevent it, possibly including manually removing each download, which can be more of a PITA than just ripping it yourself. (How's that for a runon sentence?) I would never recommend that anyone use P2P for sharing copyrighted information without permission from the copyright holder, even if it's to obtain a copy of something you already own. The only grey area is whether or not you'll get caught.

If in doubt.. http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1024

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[plover]

Will you adopt me? :-)

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[saskboy]

I used CDex, and ripped while on dialup, talking to friends over IM. When the CD finished, I'd put the next one in, call up the titles, and continue. It took a few days, but I got through all 50 some that way.

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.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Zerathdune]

you can set limewire up to not share the folder it saves stuff in. I agree, sharing stuff is generally a bad idea, since they can try to get you on distributing the stuff, But would they have any kind of a case against you if you didn't share, and already owned the stuff you're downloading? seems to me that should be fine, but is it?

of course, if the cd doesn't have a ton of DRM on it, it's probably easier to rip it yourself. more reliable too, and you can specify whatever format you choose.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[bfizzle]

Ya I would love to see the people's computers who run this service!

I'm sure they have quiet the MP3 collection....

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Professor_UNIX]

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

Because that would be copyright infringement for one thing, and for another most of the tracks you'd get on P2P networks are crappy low-bitrate rips of the songs. I don't download MP3s anymore for two reasons: 1) fear of getting a huge fine for copyright infringement and 2) I want my music in a losslessly encoded format like FLAC or the Apple Lossless encoder format so I can re-burn a CD I own as a backup in case the original is destroyed without any loss in sound quality from the original.

This is also the reason I prefer to buy CDs rather than use iTunes Music Store... If I'm going to pay full retail price for songs (albums are commonly costing more than $9.99 now and there are tracks out there that cost more than $.99 or soon will be if the RIAA gets their way) I want a non-DRM, non-lossy-encoded version of the track that I can rip to FLAC.

Now, don't take this as bashing P2P networks or iTMS, they both have their places for their users, but I'm saying that I, personally, prefer to avoid them to retain superior audio quality from a clean CD rip. As for paying someone else to rip my CDs... I think that's silly, but I don't have as extensive a collection as some people do (less than 100 CDs) so I've done it over a weekend running in the background while web browsing or playing a game on another computer the last time I tried to rip the majority of my good CDs. It is just a matter of flipping CDs and hitting import. If I had 1000 CDs or more I might consider a service like this though, but I'm a relative cheapskate (not really, saving for a house has put immense constraints on my discretionary spending in the budget) so I may just do it in the background over the course of my free weekends. ;-)

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

"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.

Maybe my family tree is wrong - but I don't see where I need to have kids to have a nephew?

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Kadin2048]

I'm with you.

The online music services have convenience going for them, but that's about all. As long as they insist on charging more than 50% of what a physical CD costs, I'll take the physical CD.

It's too bad because I really like the iTMS concept (except for the DRM), but it's just too expensive.

I'm also not cool with "renting" my music from Napster or a service like it, either. If I buy a CD a month, and happen to be short money one month, I just don't get a new CD. If I'm short paying my Napster bill, my music gets repo'ed. No, thanks, but I'll own my music -- or at least the permanent media that it's stored on.

I have lately been using everyone's favorite franchise of the Russian Mob, allofmp3.com, when I want something that's old enough that it exists in their catalog. However I listen mainly to classical music, and they sort of suck when it comes to that. However other music services should take a look at them as a model for how to operate -- pick your format (MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC too I think) and get billed by the MB. You want shit quality, fine; it's cheap. You want something you can listen to through a pair of Grados without wanting to kill yourself, you can get that too.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Markus_UW]

I think he's from Arkansas and wants to marry his sister...

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Strolls]

why not use Konqueror to... and rip mp3's

Rip the what belonging to MP3? Or are you a greengrocer?

More examples of apostrophe abuse at The Apostrophe Protection Society.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[kels]

Legal issues aside, 2 reasons not to use P2P instead:

- Quality sucks (on average)
- It would take you, if not more time than to rip them, at least a significant amount of time to find decent versions of all your CDs, complete tracks, etc.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[KermitJunior]

What's the point of having a quiet MP3 collection?

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[h4rm0ny]

Don't they have to prove that you don't?

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Zerathdune]

Yes, but even if they fail, you have to pay legal expenses. In an ideal world, downloading stuff you already own should go off without a htich, but unfortunately, that is sometimes far from reality.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[h4rm0ny]

Well it's a very quick and easy defence: "I already owned these CDs."

Now they have to prove that I don't, or didn't at the time. Of course, I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who hasn't downloaded music. I suppose it would be harder to use that defense if you hadn't got all of those CDs in your collection.

Re:Why pay for what you already have?

[Captbaritone]

Yeah, -1 overrated

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.)

Re:scratches

[BillPosters]

Toothpaste... (seriously).

Or Brass/Silver polish. Rub a bit on with a soft cloth and You should be able to get all but the worst scratches out of your CDs.

Re:scratches

[timeOday]

Are there any services that will somehow magically correct the scratches on my CD's?

Any reasonably popular CD they probably already have it on their hard drives and don't bother to rip the one you send at all.

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 :)

Re:scratches

[LukeWebber]

Try putting them back in their cases when you've finished with them, rather than decorating the room with dozens of naked CDs. They last a lot longer if they're properly cared for.

Re:scratches

[moro_666]

on a *nix machine, cdparanoia is pretty good for getting data out of damaged cd's. it does pretty good work at it if you launch it with correct command line params.

however you still have to write a new cd with the restored data. there's no toothpaste or anything else in the world that can help you to repair a piece of plastic at your own home. actually there are toothpastes with granules in them that can damage the disc even more, so don't try just "anything" on the cd-s :p

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

[pHatidic]

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.

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

[littlewiggler]

I have over 500 CD's (all purchased orignials). It would take me at least a week to rip them assuming I did nothing but sit and wait... but I work for a living and have better things to do. A service like this would be worthwhile for me...

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

[mspohr]

I ripped my entire CD collection (only about 250 CDs) while I was working at home on other projects. I went very smoothly (used CDEX). I put everything on an old IBM laptop (running Ubuntu) and hooked it up to my stereo... I call it my "BigPod"... works great!

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[elmegil]

I've got >1500 CDs, purchased since the mid-late 80's, and I have no need of a ripping service. Quite honestly, it seems to me ripping things as I want to listen to them is going to be quite fine, since there's no way I can listen to all or even most of the 19,000 tracks any time soon. (Yes, I keep a database, why do you ask?)

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

[daliman]

Oh, come on. Even if this were the case (that using a CD drive to read CDs ruins it), then a CD drive is _still_ only worth a couple of overpriced albums at today's prices. It's not like it's even real money at that point in time anyway...

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Lehk228]

i think the bigger problem was that anyone could download a CDDB CD ID list and get whatever the fark they wanted form mp3.com

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[iamlucky13]

Seriously. This is Slashdot for crying out loud. How many of you people take your computer in to CompUSA because you "lead a busy life?" It would take just as long to organize your collection, fill out the necessary forms and ship it anyways.

1. Download DBpoweramp: 3 minutes on DSL
2. Put CD in drive and start ripping: 2 minutes
3. Walk away and cook dinner/weed the garden/go to work: ???
4. Return and change CD's: 2 minutes

Staying true to your nerd roots: timeless

There are somethings money can't buy, but for an extra fee, you can upgrade to premium.

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

[zerocool^]

• like me, they have grammer than the average slashdotter.
  

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

[Khaotix]

I did something very similar. Picked up some SATA drives to replace a pair of 120GBs. Put them in a old p4 system that I turned into a media/m.a.m.e machine. Ran two sessions of cdex and I cooked through my collection.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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!"

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[andy jenkins]

I rip my own CDs and it's a right pain in the arse.

Firstly, my aging laptop takes about 40 mins to rip and encode a CD.

Secondly, I can either have Internet or my external CD-ROM connected, not both at the same time - so I hand enter titles.

Thirdly, my laptop's 12GB hard disc is chock-full of crap with free space of about one (uncompressed) CD.

Sure, I could rip directly onto my 20GB player over USB1.1 (not brave enough to find out how much extra time that'll take) and connect the network card in later to update my tags. But I'm too lazy get my routine and software sorted.

But I'm lucky, I have a computer. I know iPod users who don't own a computer.

I'd love to be able to walk to my local Internet cafe and come back an hour later to collect my music - like I can with my digital camera.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[somethinghollow]

• like me, they make sure they spell words properly more than the average grammar nazi.

doh!

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[wed128]

Just curiosity, not a flame:

How does one use an iPod without owning a computer?

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[delirium_9]

I bought my iPod because I didn't own a computer (well I owned 2 computers but they were a continent away and weren't coming to me any time soon). What I did have was a bunch of mp3 cds which I had made for my discman. A few hours in an internet cafe and I had a whole lot of music in one place. And that music pretty much lasted me a year*. I did buy four cds during that year but those only required short trips to the net cafe.

I mean think about it, if you have a computer then your iPod will only ever really be away from it for one or two days tops. You don't need 30 gigs of music for two days. Really, you don't need 30 gigs of music for two months. With a smaller device, one that holds up to say 5 gigs, you'd still have more music than you could listen to and could just sync it with your computer to change songs when you feel like it.

I didn't have that luxury at the time so I bought the biggest iPod I could find instead.

If I were to buy a music player now I'd get something with a smaller hard drive and form factor. But that's because I have a computer again.

*long story short I was working in Japan and didn't want to buy cds if I didn't have the luggage space to bring them back with me. Of the cds I did buy, I'm pretty certain they're all still over there.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[HD Webdev]

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.

Who said anything about ripping an entire collection in one sitting?

That aside, ~$25 (home PC) CD drives are easy to find at retailers for this purpose

I will concede the heating part even if only 10 CDs are ripped in a row. when I ripped my ~900 CD collection, I did it at half of the rated speed of the CD drive. And, I would never suggest that someone burn a collection on a laptop.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[vought]

• Download DBpoweramp: 3 minutes on DSL
• Put CD in drive and start ripping: 2 minutes
• Walk away and cook dinner/weed the garden/go to work: ???
• Return and change CD's: 2 minutes

My wife and I have about 1200 CDs and about $500.00 in iTunes between us. (Now that we're cohabitating, I'm anxious for the next version of jhymn, so I can strip her DRM and convert it to a single account.)

I can't afford any of these ripping services, but I normally keep a stack of discs next to my Rev. A Dual G5. When I'm working, so is the DV-104...it hasn't died yet, but I suppose that's a risk. At some point in my life, I know I'll finish up with all the discs, but it IS a significant investment in time to stop, switch discs, and babysit the occasional rare disc that isn't stored in CDDB.

Besides, I'd wear a path in the carpet if I took your approach; the G5's drive will rip as fast as the drive will spin, and I would wager that it'll work even faster given a faster CD drive. It takes all of 3-4 minutes to rip the average "clean" CD. Scratched (well-loved) ones take a little longer.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[andy jenkins]

How does one use an iPod without owning a computer?

By using a friend's computer.

Hey, an iPod's a fashion item so you just gotta have one!
A computer on the other hand, is not.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Isn't the price of the CD drive still a lot less than ripping an entire collection? You do have a point with the laptop drive thing, those are a little more expensive, though I've bought replacement laptop DVD drive for my model for $30 on eBay to replace a suspected bad drive. I really haven't ruined any drive by ripping a CD.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[toddestan]

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.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[karnal]

My wife and I have about 1200 CDs and about $500.00 in iTunes between us. (Now that we're cohabitating, I'm anxious for the next version of jhymn, so I can strip her DRM

You're married now. Your wife will be stripping YOUR DRM soon enough. It's like sucking out your will to live!!

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[alphaseven]

i think the bigger problem was that anyone could download a CDDB CD ID list and get whatever the fark they wanted form mp3.com

Nah, mp3.com would query for several random bytes of the cd in question, so the person would pretty much have to have a copy of the cd. I remember the security was considered strong but they lost in court anyway because it was deemed to still be copyright infringement, see Umg vs. Mp3.com.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[kesuki]

Some of us buy hardware that was engineered better than an edsel.

you know the ones that can handle more than 5 cds before they like die.

i mean wtf. if they're enginnered right the moving parts should have no difficulty making it to 50k hours mtbf. 200k hours isn't that hard to do but costs signifigantly more. 50k hours is of course 50,000 CDs, you gonna rip and burn more than 25,000 CDS? wtf is up with you bitching about a cd drive that burns out after 'a hundred' because it was designed to fail?

junkware is NOT what i buy, I've never ever had a CD-rom drive fail, and although i've had many junkware DVD drives fail, I've finally found a well designed one that PUTS FUCKING HEATSINKS ON THE CHIPS THAT NEED THEM.

thank god someone didn't flunk thermodynamics and realizes 'hot chips melt, if heat is allowed to build up, and that pisses off the people who might otherwise tell others to buy your stuff'

btw, the drive I own and have burned over 100 DVDs with is an NEC it's the cheap one at newegg.com the burning laser runs hotter too, remember that folks, I have a 'mainstream' DVD-rom drive that couldn't 'read' 50 DVD movies before it fried, but i've Burned more than 100 with a Properly Designed burner.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[badasscat]

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.

Ummm, no? What century are you living in?

If I want to listen to a "CD", I reach for my iPod. Often, I do this as I am walking out the door. What is the use to me of a CD that has not yet been ripped in that situation? The fact of the matter is if I'm out the door on my way to work, I don't have time to sit there and rip a CD, then transfer it to my iPod afterwards.

It seems to me that the whole point of ripping music for a lot of people (not everyone, but a lot of people) is to get that music onto a portable player of some kind. And people have portable players because they're portable, i.e. you just grab them when you're on your way out, and have them with you all the time. Why should I have to plan in advance what I'm going to listen to?

So I, like probably 99% of the rest of the world that's ripped their collections, did it in one fell swoop. I did it myself, and I'd do it again, but yes, the time investment was such that if my collection was any bigger, it probably wouldn't be worth it. I've got about 300 CD's and using the "--preset standard" setting on LAME, it took me several days on a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 with a fast CD drive. It is not an instantaneous process. Then there's the process of getting all that music into iTunes (or whatever library you use) and transferring it to your portable player.

(Sure, you could just import using iTunes and cut the time investment down a tiny bit, but it still takes a little while to rip, and anyway LAME is a better encoder than iTunes for mp3. I use mp3 so I'm not locked into the iPod forever.)

I guess if you have no portable player and you use your PC as your sole music player, then you could get away with just importing as you go along. A portable player, though, is pretty much useless unless it's pre-loaded with stuff. Which means an all-at-once rip, and if I had 500 CD's and some disposable cash available, I might choose to pay someone else to do it too.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Scarletdown]

The CD Ripping process is mostly an unattended operation, so unless you or your computer are incapable of multitasking, then the time to rip a CD shouldn't even be a factor. For instance, just moments before I started this post, I put my 2112 CD in the drive and fired up KAudioCreator. The prog immediately read the disc and brought up a menu with 2 choices from a CDDB database (Progressive Rock or Heavy Metal). I made my choice, selected OK, and the CD Ripping began automatically.

No need for me to just watch the CD Ripping screen the entire time. While SunBlossom (my primary workstation) is busy ripping the CD, I can go do other stuff, like posting on Slashdot, taking care of my eBay auctions, working on one of my stories, cramming for my upcoming NCO Academy test, etc.

Additionally, who says that one has to rip their entire collection in one sitting? It's not like it's a super top-priority tasking or anything like that. Just do a few whenever you feel like it, and eventually, you will have your collection archived.

Now, I think a more useful service as far as music archiving goes would be recording cassette, vinyl, and 8Track collections to mp3 or ogg. That does take considerably more work than ripping CDs.

***

Ah good. 2112 is done. Time to start Fly By Night...

***

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Lawrence_Bird]

Dude.. nobody is gonna rip hundreds of cds in a row (well except
maybe you). 10 or 15 an hour max, and not that many people will do
this for hours on end.  I did my collection (about 400) in about a
month a few years ago.  Grab 20 or 30 at a time, somedays less some
more.  This biggest problem is actually stopping what you are doing to
switch cd's when they are done.  Operator lag definitely slows the
process! Personally I use CDEX but I'm sure there are many other good
ones to use.

Using a service just seems like an incredible waste of money.  If you
have waited this long to digitize them whats a few days/weeks doing
them while surfing or whatever else? 

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[elmegil]

Why should I have to plan in advance what I'm going to listen to?

You bothered to buy the CD in the first place, right? If that's not "planning in advance" then I'm Linus Torvalds. I forget, the slashdot crowd has the attention span of a gnat. Sitting down to spend 15 minutes ripping the music they might want to listen to tomorrow is just too much work. And damn, if after a month of that kind of minimal investment you wouldn't have all those 500 CDs all ripped and ready for the rest of your feeble pathetic life.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[plover]

I find the answer to hiring vs. doing usually comes down to "depends."

For example, my wife and I just scanned her parent's 35mm slides and are burning DVDs for them for Christmas. We scanned all of these old slides. All 36 carousels of them. All 3,407 slides of cousins, nieces, nephews, moms, dads, grandkids, vacations, cabins, lakes and mountains. (I am pretty sick of them now!) The reason is the local photo houses all gave me quotes around $3.00 per slide. For $10,000+ I'll do it myself, especially when it's something I know how to do and can have my wife help.

I had an accountant do our taxes when they were tricky and some of it was new to me, but now I use one of the tax packages and the stuff I learned from the CPA and do them myself. It really takes about the same overall time as scheduling an appointment and going over stuff with the guy for an hour.

Construction and home repairs? I'll do those myself simply because I enjoy them.

But ripping CDs? I probably have a couple hundred, and (not having a use for an iPod) I've never really felt the need to be bothered with it. If they were reasonably priced (perhaps a dollar a disc) I'd consider it. If I thought I would ever have use for an iPod, I'd probably do it myself.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[shawb]

$12.99 + $4.00 shipping and that's for a retail boxed one, not OEM. That's about as much as buying one CD these days.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[RoadDogTy]

I ripped 150 CDs in a row, drive is still running like a champ...

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Hohlraum]

thanks for the pointer. I've got a couple drives and I'm in the process of ripping my collection (few hundred). I'm going to alternate which drive I use to do each rip to give the other a chance to cool down a bit. I really do think these things we're designed to be used though. I don't see 10 or 11 straight hours of use for a couple days breaking them.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Spackler]

And you plan to listen to all 500 of them the week after that? Give me a break.

Thank goodness someone said it. I've had my new ipod for about 3 weeks now. I decided to (finally) re-encode all my CDs because of all the varying qualities I ripped them at over the years. I grabbed a stack of my favorites, and I bring them out about 20 at a time. When those are on the other side of the desk, I go to the basement and grab another stack. My favorite stuff is on there now, and I'm now loading the stuff I listen to about twice a year. As long as you keep at it, there is always plenty to listen to. The best part is that it gives me an excuse to listen to the more esoteric stuff I have not listened to you in years because I just ripped it.

Oh, and the complaint that the XXAA pig fsckers had about the sale of an ipod not increasing sales, um, duh, I already had music to put on there. Why should switching formats make me go buy music again (like it used to). Am I supposed to go out and buy a few hundred CDs to replace them?

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Jedi Alec]

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.

You do realize there's a difference between playing a disc(1 speed) or using DAE to rip it(whatever the max speed of the drive is), right?

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[fm6]

The tags might be a mess for less popular music, but that can easily be fixed up afterwards.

You'll have to fix them yourself in any case. For 99 cents a CD, you're not paying enough to have someone fix up your tags for you.

Like you, I would never pay somebody else to do something like this. But I'm more tight-fisted than almost anybody who has a decent income. Every department store and every car lot is full of stuff that I'd never spend money on — and yet millions of people spend billions of dollars on them.

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.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[trezor]

Why should switching formats make me go buy music again (like it used to). Am I supposed to go out and buy a few hundred CDs to replace them?

Yes. Hope this helps.

Yours sincerely
the RIAA.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[pla]

1) Download DBpoweramp: 3 minutes on DSL
...
Staying true to your nerd roots: timeless

Uhh, "real" geeks would use either EAC or, for the open-source purists, CDex.

Not to start a religious vi-vs-emacs-esque war, but personally, I prefer CDex not so much for its open-source-ness, but because it has a HELL of a lot cleaner interface than EAC. Good example of "the best" choice getting passed over because someone can't bother to make a decent GUI (or just release a command-line version with well-documented switches, even!).

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[CrankyOG]

This would have been a good first post.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[MarkGriz]

Going OT now, but I've been contemplating doing the same for my parents slide collection.
What brand/model slide scanner did you use, and how did they turn out?

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[rihjol]

True, but...
If you're ripping enough CDs for this to be a problem, going by these services prices, it'd still be much cheaper to just buy a cheap, sacrificial cdrom drive and beat on that. Even for the laptop, you could find an external cdrom drive that would be cheaper.
I'll agree with time arguments, but economically, it's not a great deal.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[mennucc1]

OK, so make the price of a new DVD drive as part of the deal. How many CD can you rip before your old CD drive breaks? Suppose you can rip 200 CDs; since a new DVD drive will cost 25$, this makes for an extra 12cent for CD. So: you give 50cent to your son/nephew Jay for each ripping, and add an extra 12cent for a new drive: it amounts to 62cent, and this is less than any company in the article sports. On the upside:

• you do not risk your CD being lost/stolen/damaged while shipping,
• you replace an old CD drive with a new DVD drive
• and Jay has some money to go to the restaurant with a date.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Morgalyn]

That was great! But seriously, just pay the kids to do it for you. Duh! That's what that many kids are for! I swear my parents had me for the sole purpose of doing house and yardwork. Blargh.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Error of Ruto]

If I could, I would mod you up.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Pope]

Everything I've ever encoded with iTunes is an MP3, so what are you on about being "locked into the iPod forever" ?! On G4/G5 Macs, it's the fastest encoder out there, plus if you want LAME, there's a LAME plug-in: http://blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[Lawbeefaroni]

The prices in the article/review ranged from $62 to around $130 to rip 100 CDs. You could burn our your CD player, crap on your keyboard, and get a case of beer and still come out on top if you did it yourself.

The only justifications for such services are to save time and effort. There will certainly be enough interest based on that alone. But to say it's worth $100 because you might blowout some POS CDROM drive is bad math.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[plover]

Wow, I could write a paper on the process (and I actually did write one for my workflow.)

I first tried a projector-based copybox, designed for videocamera recording a slideshow from your existing projector. It was about $120. I set up my digital camera at one end, and projected the slides onto a tiny 5" screen at the other end. Really crap quality, the lighting from the lamp and reflector was very uneven, and the focus was blurred due to the nature of the matte plastic screen. But it was really fast, I shot a dozen carousels in a weekend before I could no longer stand to see that crap picture quality. I deleted the pictures.

I returned the copybox to the camera store in partial exchange for a Minolta Dimage II scanner. (Minolta is selling Dimage IV scanners now, which are physically and mechanically very similar but have better optics and electronics.) Mine is USB 1.2 (USB hi-speed didn't come out till the Dimage III), and it takes about six minutes to scan a tray of four slides at half resolution. Scanning at full resolution added about 50 seconds per slide (on USB 1.2), so I decided half was acceptable. Apparently the Dimage IV is supposed to scan one slide every 30 seconds -- that I'd like to see.

My scanner came with two slide trays and a six-hole negative carrier. Having two trays really helps, you can be scanning one while you unload, load and clean the next set of four slides, so I'd say definitely buy an extra tray if you only get one. By the way, brush and blow each and every trayfull of slides before scanning. A cheap little rubber squeezy blower brush from the camera store will work fine. You'd be amazed at how much you can improve the pictures with this simple step.

Minolta also offers an APS film carrier option, which can scan a whole roll of APS film at one shot. If I had to deal with APS cameras, that'd definitely be the route I'd take.

The scanner is well designed and well built, very good for a heavy home user like myself. I think I paid about $250-$300 for the floor demo model. I would have preferred a scanner that would have accepted a carousel, or a stack feeder, but those start over $1000. I've also heard plenty of horror stories about misfeeds and jams with the lower end equipment, things like "I never got more than 7 slides between jams!" I'm mostly happy with the Minolta hardware, but would have loved something much faster.

Software wise, I found Minolta's program was not set up very well for batch scanning. I ended up buying the pro version of Vuescan from Hamrick software ($80?), and have been very happy with it. It supports a huge list of different scanners; I'd go so far as to say don't buy a scanner that's not on his list (that's very few, by the way.) Vuescan is much faster to focus than the Minolta software, it was about 20 seconds faster *per slide* on my box. Also, it supports batch scanning -- insert a tray, it will scan all four slides without user intervention.

The colors have been pretty good, but I think my lamp is starting to fade again. I've already burned out one $120 lamp, so I'd say don't leave them on overnight. Vuescan does supports scanning an ITF calibration target. I wish I had bought one, but they're about $145 and since Vuescan comes with a pre-scanned calibration file for most every supported scanner model I figured it was "close enough for my inlaws." I scanned each slide at about 2400 dpi resolution, the scanner supports 4800 dpi but the lack of USB 2.0 made that an extra 50 seconds per slide too slow. Besides, I'm mostly collecting the data in order to burn it to DVDs, I still have much higher resolution than the crappy NTSC signal.

While it was scanning, I kept busy in Paint Shop Pro rotating and straightening the images, enhancing colors, lightening underexposed pictures, trimming the images inside the frames, eliminating big scratches, fixing red-eyes, cropping out the divorced cousin-in-law whenever possible, etc. And I really don't know how my mother-in-law was able to take

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[helfom]

Even if it does kill your cd-drive (which, if you do it right, it shouldn't), for about $15 bucks for a cd drive, I think its reasonable to sacrifice one to the job and toss it after it breaks.

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[MarkGriz]

Wow! I was expecting something along the lines of "I bought a XXXX for $nnn at Best Buy"
That reply was above and beyond the call. Very informative indeed.

Thank you kindly,

Mark

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[plover]

You're welcome. I basically wanted to encourage you to do it because the gift is appreciated like you just can't imagine. But there were some amazingly large learning and expense curves that went along with this project, and just saying "buy a Minolta scanner" is totally inadequate to prepare you for what you'll be doing. I figure if I can get you past the hard lessons (wasting time with a projector/copybox, fighting with scanning software, file name conventions, etc.,) that you'll be more likely to try it.

Oh, one more warning regarding assembling the slides into MPEGs for burning on a CD. I started by trying to burn VCDs (and SVCDs) because I didn't have a DVD burner at the time. I purchased the camera store's recommendation of Pinnacle Studio 6. What a buggy piece of crap! I struggled with weekly patches and constant crashing for the entire first year. It wasn't until the next year when I bought a DVD burner (they became affordable) that I got Arcsoft Showbiz for free with the burner, and it was truly a joy to have a piece of software that just worked. It's pretty simplistic, but it does the job and it doesn't leak memory! (Last year I ran out of time so I didn't bother making the MPEG movies and just gave him a DVD with the raw JPGs on it. But that's completely DVD-player dependent, and he's not technically inclined enough to navigate a slideshow. The compiled DVD is a much better choice.)

I do intend to write up the experience and post it on a web site, but that'll be an after-christmas project of its own. I'd also like to get the pictures up in some gallery software so friends and family can share them from whenever and wherever. But that'll be a lesson for another day.

Good luck!

Whoops, they forgot one...

[dada21]

http://www.riaa.org/freerip4u/

1. $0.00 / CD, No shipping needed
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Anyone wonder how many Sony Rootkits (tm) these guys got?

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

Re:price?what?

[Anonymous Coward]

replace lame -b with flac -6 and you're there. with drives as large as they are now why bother with lossy compression? the good thing about flac is that it also stores an md5 checksum of the pcm data so you even run validity checks on your media. simply transcode to your desired portable music player format at your convenience without having to re-rip!

Re:price?what?

[Brandybuck]

Way too complicated. I just insert my audio CD and drag-n-drop ogg files out of Konqueror...

Re:price?what?

[EngMedic]

the only reason i default to mp3 is because the only portable player i know of that plays flac is the rio karma, and it was discontinued about 6 months ago

Re:price?what?

[6*7]

To many actions, faster alternative:
while : ; do abcde; eject; echo "insert new cd and press enter"; done

Re:price?what?

[agraupe]

Well, with large drives the way they are, why don't you just use WAV? C'mon, I have a big hard drive, but it fills up damn fast. I need all the space I can get, and I just don't lose enough quality to justify taking up more space with my music.

Re:price?what?

[diogenes57]

abcde: http://lly.org/~rcw/abcde/page/

A Better CD Encoder does all of ripping, encoding to ogg, and tagging in one command: abcde. Or encode to flac with abcde -o flac.

Re:price?what?

[h2odragon]

I'm just switching to flac (maybe), from wav, for my pitiful 50gb music collection. One reason: ReplayGain volume normailizing. I havent normalized the .wavs because i still want the ability to burn real copies of the cds for the car. I'll find out this weekend if the normailizing flac gives me distorts the sound enough to bug me.

Yes, i have hypersensitive ears. MP3 fuzz makes me psychotic in seconds.

Re:price?what?

[6*7]

That obviously should be:
while read ; do ....

Re:price?what?

[jjustus]

Otherwise, more like

apt-get install abcde
# put cd in drive
abcde

It does CDDB queries too, and encodes while still ripping the disk.

Re:price?what?

[asoukup]

One small problem with WAV is that the current tagging situation s*cks. If you're going to rip, why not make sure everything is tagged during rip time. FLAC at least has semi decent tags and when you go to encode there are enough apps out there to convert the FLAC tags to mp3 or whatever the lossy flavor of the day filetype is.

If you just rip to WAV you're gonna have to go back later and probably hand enter all the track/artist/album info and THAT would take boatloads of time

Re:price?what?

[agraupe]

By the same token, I bet you have a good sound system on which to listen to things. I have fairly sensitive ears, but I am nowhere near the level you are in terms of detecting compression. It is important to remember that, for the average person listening on a shitty pair of iPod earbugs (God, I hate those things), there will really be no difference what a given song is encoded with, because the speakers/headphones/earbuds sound so shitty anyway.

Damaged?

[MiKM]

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.

Re:Damaged?

[kalpol]

They probably just download the files from Bittorrent and you never know the difference. I mean, really, how can they rip X amount of CDs in 2-5 days?

Re:Damaged?

[eander315]

They probably only have to rip the really obscure stuff. I would imagine they keep copies of popular albums and just verify that you own the disc.

I wonder if they verify that the disc will even play?

Re:Damaged?

[gnasher719]

'' I mean, really, how can they rip X amount of CDs in 2-5 days? ''

If I wanted to do that kind of thing, I would just buy the ten cheapest Dells that I could find, and a dozen spare CD drives, just in case. One Dell for each customer. Feed them CDs as fast as you can, walking from one machine to the next.

KDE's cool ripper

[mayhemt]

This was sometime back when I was playing around with KDE & SuSe. I was searching sourceforge/freshmeat for some cool ripper. they were problems compilin & shit with them. I poked around into /mnt/cdrom in konqueror & HOLY SHIT it has mp3 & ogg vorbis folders. I was shocked to see mp3 supplied by the CD manufacture. later i came to know it was KDE's feature!!! All i had to was copy/paste folder into HD partitions...i was like holy goddamn! KDE has an inbuilt ripper. thats it, i never searched for a ripper. just My 2c.

Re:KDE's cool ripper

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

To me, that's annoying and misleading. I want to see whatever data is actually on the disc, not that KDE pretends there are MP3 files there.

Re:KDE's cool ripper

[DigitalReverend]

What data do you see on an audio CD?

Re:KDE's cool ripper

[SpinJaunt]

Like this:

0101010101011111010101001100101010..

but more like

Mäè³úÿÿÿuä † h´ÁA Pè fÄ‹Îè> h˜fA Zh è...úÿÿjZl è( j‹ÎÆFè‹&#2 7; ˆz ˆz ˆz ˆz¬ ÿl€A PMØè\ EÜjPMØÆEüè& #4; ‹ h°ÁA Pè+È ÷ØYÀYþÀM܈ Eãèþ 8]ãtÿ†P ‹Îˆ^
è# ëÆF
ˆ^9zL uj‹Îˆ^è›$ †˜ PSVhF@ SSÿh€A P‰†oe ÿd€A MØÆEüè MÌÆEü‰}Ìè!&#1 94; MäÆEü
è‚ MìÆEü èv ‹Mô‹Æ_^[d‰ €eü Mðèhþÿÿ‹Mô&#82 49;Æ^d‰

Re:KDE's cool ripper

[WWWWolf]

The kioslave is cool, just that it has some annoying sides:

1. Can't set the compression quality.
2. An annoying abuse of resources: amaroK uses the kioslave to play CDs. In other words, it rips the data and plays it. As a result my Athlon XP 3000+ is always skipping while playing CDs, but my father's old 486DX-33 isn't. =/ I think I'll stick to gnome-cd and workbone to play CDs.

Plus it's a thingy that's only visible to KDE apps too... I hope someone makes a FUSE thing to rip CDs. "cp /mnt/cdripper/track_1_vorbis_q6.ogg a_random_song.ogg"

Re:KDE's cool ripper

[MightyYar]

All that is on an audio CD is redbook data - nothing that your computer can use directly. In other words, there is no "file system" as such. Showing mp3 or ogg files is no different than when the computer shows AIFF files... no matter what, it is still translating the raw redbook data. That is why there is so much argument about using cdparanoia vs eac vs the built-in Windows/Linux AIFF translation.

Personally, I use "abcde" and just keep feeding the computer as I work...

Only MP3?

[ScoLgo]

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.

Re:Only MP3?

[Aaron Denney]

Read the article, two will provide .flac on request.

Re:Only MP3?

[Achra]

Wow, you must be a lot old-sk00ler than me, we used to use ^H^H^H. :) What is W? Delete?

Re:Only MP3?

[HeelToe]

On most modern shells ^W will delete the previous word.

Delete would be displayed as ^?.

Re:Only MP3?

[Achra]

Ah, right. It's all coming back now.

Re:Only MP3?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Old school unix is #### - they didn't have control keys back then.

Re:Only MP3?

[chillywillycd]

i actually used FYCD to rip all my CDs to FLAC. got a great deal because i work with the guy, so didn't have to pay shipping. but it was really convenient to have somebody else do the work, and have the whole collection organized in a set of DVDs for back up.

Re:Hey fags

[Travelsonic]

Yeah, ripping off the flamebait and making the provider look like the ass. ^_^

News for tomorrow...

[SeanMon]

All the companies reviewed in this article have inexplicably been shutdown by an virus, called RIAA.pwn, which uses the Sony-created rootkit.

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!

[psyon1]

C. Applying album art.

Why do people have to apply album art? Is it worth keeping?

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[elmegil]

Because after all, some ripping service is going to categorize/tag their music the same way I do. Not.

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[zinc]

jumpin' jeezus on a pogo stick. i have a collection that large all encoded as flac. it took me about a month to rip with my two linux boxes during evenings when i wasn't climbing. it's no big deal.

http://pjf.net/

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[GiMP]

You're assuming that people don't work a day job, go to school, run a side business, read books, and attend martial arts classes.. plus have time for the wife and kids. I see that things like slashdot and cd ripping really fit into that equation.

Not everyone has the free time you do.

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[ClamIAm]

Believe it or not, there ARE people out there with legitimate, 500+ CD collections who would rather not [hassle with the ripping process].

Um, I would think that the majority of people who have 500+ CD collections would probably not want to do this. 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. This is one reason iTunes is so popular...

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[pboulang]

Seems to me that ripping CD's fits in perfectly with reading.. get a good scriptto read like abcde to do the hard work, you just have to swap CDs every page or two and then hit a button. But then, you didn't put in "listening to music other than from CDs" on your list, so it must be really low priority.

Oh, and the irony of posting on slashdot about not having time for slashdot isn't lost, just ignored.

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.

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[Pollardito]

i'm curious though if cddb/freedb isn't exactly what these services are using. if you're not happy with the content of those databases, you may have to clean up after the very expensive ripping anyway

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[LordKronos]

I'll probably get modded down for praising a microsoft product, but....

It was that easy for me. I just used Windows Media Player to rip 450 CDs to MP3. For 99% of CDs, it literally was that easy. Set up Media Player to rip on CD insert, eject on completion. All I had to do was insert the CD and wait for it to eject. It ripped the songs, tagged them about 99% accurately, downloaded album art for each CD automatically, and organized them by Artist\Album\track-songname.mp3

Like I said, tagging was almost perfect. I did a quick look at the file system...looking for bands that had 2 folders spelled differently. Merged those into a single folder. Did a recursive grep on the entire tree for any songs with "track" or "untitled" in the filename. Fixed those manually. Loaded my entire collection into MythTV, let it scan the ID3 tags, and then looked through the list for ID3 misspellings/inconsistancies (which show up as the same band listed twice with different spellings). Fixed the 3 CDs where that happened. Browsed through the entire catalog manually, just doing a once-over to make sure everything looked decent. My collection is now very accurately titled with only about 15 minutes of work on fixing up the mistakes. I'm sure there are a few errors left in my collection, but I'm not gonna get all bent out of shape about it. If I didn't notice it already, it's not that significant. I'll just fix them when I find them. The practical approach

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[HawkingMattress]

About the genres : I found a solution to that which works 99% of the time.
Just ditch the category browser you have in your mp3 library, and use dynamic views instead of it. Then have the views regroup the categories...
For example, make a view called "rock", and have it group every genre name which contains *rock* but not *hard* if you want to have a special category for hard rock. Then create a metal category, which groupe *heavy*, "hard rock", *trash*... etc. This way you don't have to touch what was entered in freedb most of the time, and it just works. "Classic rock", "classic-rock" and "rock'n'roll" will all end up in the rock view, which is probably where they should belong. Then you don't end up with 100+ categories which make the thing useless. And you can add an "other" view which takes all the genres that did not match previous views, and edit the genres listed in this view if you wish...

Re:Silence, Nerds!

[Lando]

Actually, it sounds kind of interesting. My wife has a large collection of music. I'm not interested in ripping all of it, something like this, if I had the cash would be nice for a Christmas present.

they make it so easy

[Darius Jedburgh]

Believe me, it's not easy to fit half a ton of CDs into the mailbox.

my.mp3.com?

[devnullkac]

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.

Re:my.mp3.com?

[Iamthewalrus]

How would anyone ever know?

Re:my.mp3.com?

[agibbs]

They'll get sued, and then discovery requests will request their computers/opperations manuals and then it'll come out.

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

[ynohoo]

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

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. 300 of them. And I want them lossless, with cover art, handled carefully, cleaned, insured on the trip out and back, and the clicks and pops and surface noise cleaned up. And to be blown regularly while I wait.

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

[ynohoo]

So what's the price range for your service?

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually do this as a service. If you are still interested, please visit www.vinyl2disc.com. Perhaps I'll be talking to you a bit later.

-Vinyl2Disc.com

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

[jadin]

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

Give it time, some professors used optics to play records. Keeps the record from degrading with use.

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

[mapinguari]

CDBBQ does this. They also have a searchable network of record dealers to buy from, in case you don't already own the LP.

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

[cskaryd]

That's why Ion created the USB turntable.

Not a service, but still nifty.

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

[MightyYar]

Your life must be pretty miserable if a missing space compels you to post on Slashdot.

FLAC

[Nightspirit]

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]).

Re:FLAC

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Isn't there a utility you could use to just convert your 128 mp3's to FLAC?

Yes, I'm kidding ;-)

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

FLAC is overkill unless you want to rebuild your audio CDs in their pristine state. If your are going strictly for archival purposes, FLAC is the way to go. For everything else, ripping to OGG Vorbis at quality 5-6 is quite acceptable, IMO. I started out way too low initially, but 6 is ~192kbps and sounds quite good--that is what I am sticking with these days. Can all but the most discerning ear tell the difference between these files and the originals? I really doubt it...

I'm not going to send my CDs to one of these services, I have been in the process of ripping my entire collection to Vorbis for quite some time. No rush, I have a lot done--enough to entertain me while I am in the process of finishing the rest...

Re:FLAC

[Malc]

I ripped everything to FLAC, and also OGG. The OGGs are at quality 5 (~160 Kbs), which seemed equivalent to ~192 Kbs VBR MP3. They're okay on headphones in a noisy environment (e.g. plane), but they sound quite poor on my stereo in the living room. I'm a little disappointed as I'd hoped to use my iRiver via Toslink as a juke box. It will do, but only when I have friends over and we're drinking plenty of booze ;)

Re:FLAC

[Nightspirit]

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.

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

6 sounds better. Since you have everything in FLAC you could try some quick comparisons. Let's just say, it definitely works streaming Vorbis Q6 files from my samba server to PC speaker systems at the very least. :-)

Oh how spoiled we are. Have we forgotten the utter crappiness of tape so soon? LOL

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?

Re:FLAC

[Kjella]

FLAC is overkill unless you want to rebuild your audio CDs in their pristine state. If your are going strictly for archival purposes, FLAC is the way to go.

And format changes. MP3? OGG? WMA? AAC? not-yet-released-format X? FLAC is definately the most future-proof format, and the cost of a 250GB HDD is nothing like the time spent ripping. Even within a format there are many different encoders and qualities. FLAC is a way to be able to always change your mind.

Re:FLAC

[Malc]

BTW, I chose -q5 instead instead of -q6 for the OGGs due to the disc space requirements of my portable. With more space, I would have chosen higher bitrate MP3s as they give 50% more battery life. Oh the trade-offs.

Tape? What's that? I think I have a few hundred of those kicking around somewhere - they haven't been touched since I got my first few CDs twn or fifteen years ago.

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

FLAC is overkill unless you want to rebuild your audio CDs in their pristine state. If your are going strictly for archival purposes, FLAC is the way to go.

And format changes. MP3? OGG? WMA? AAC? not-yet-released-format X? FLAC is definately the most future-proof format, and the cost of a 250GB HDD is nothing like the time spent ripping. Even within a format there are many different encoders and qualities. FLAC is a way to be able to always change your mind.

But you are basically saying the same thing I am. If you are going for archival purposes then FLAC is the way to go--whether you are rebuilding CD Audio or new Vorbis or MP3 files. Same difference...

I like buying on-line music in FLAC format, for example when I purchase from places like Magnatune or Live Metallica. I keep those FLAC files and then covert them into whatever I need. Perfect quality files to start with since I am not getting a physical CD with my purchase...

I see your point though, if you dump to FLAC first you can easily batch convert those files into whatever other codec you wish. A really quick way to media shift your entire collection in one easy CLI command. Moving metadata with the media shift is the real trick though, eh? Also, it's going to be a while before portable players have the kind of storage your taking about. There again, FLAC for archiving is great, but you have to consider other formats for more general usages...

Long post short(er), I agree--FLAC is the ideal to use to archive your CD collection as media shifting from that point is a snap. Still, Vorbis at q=6 is pretty good too and not going away either, since it's a patent-free open codec. Not lossless of course, but good enough for my purposes...

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

Tape? What's that? I think I have a few hundred of those kicking around somewhere - they haven't been touched since I got my first few CDs twn or fifteen years ago.

LOL, yeah but I'm sure you remember how crappy they would end up sounding after a few runs in the car?

Actually, I have a box full of tapes too--a lot of stuff I don't have on CD audio. I may waste the time and dump them to digital one of these days. Some are in better shape then others. My Dad had a whole collection of stuff on reel-to-reel. Some of that would definitely be cool to media shift into this century. It's that or it will soon be totally lost to the world. Finding a working reel-to-reel deck is the, er, real trick though...

Re:FLAC

[tuffy]

Moving metadata with the media shift is the real trick though, eh?

Not really. FLAC's metadata is nearly trivial to extract. With the aid of FLAC's format page and Python's "struct" module, I was pulling out the Vorbis comments in about in an hour. From there, it's a simple matter to add those tags to LAME's arguments when piping from FLAC to LAME for the transcoding.

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

> Moving metadata with the media shift is the real trick though, eh?

Not really. FLAC's metadata is nearly trivial to extract. With the aid of FLAC's format page and Python's "struct" module, I was pulling out the Vorbis comments in about in an hour. From there, it's a simple matter to add those tags to LAME's arguments when piping from FLAC to LAME for the transcoding.

There's always a way, sometimes it just takes a while to find/implement it. The Perl Audio Converter I used not too long ago was very simple to use but getting all the dependicies together to make it play nice was a pain. At any rate, for the purpose of converting and keeping the metadata intact, it worked great.

More to the point of the original story though--I think the majority of /. folks would do their own ripping before sending their CD collections off to have someone else do it for them. I did mention the concept to a friend as a thought to add to his media business services though for the rest of the world who are too busy or lazy to rip their own but still want thier collection on their iPod or whatever. I wouldn't think you'd want to consider this business model for your sole source of income, but as a value-added service why not?

Re:FLAC

[Castar]

The reason I use FLAC is not for rebuilding my CDs in pristine state, but to more easily enable transcoding to the format-du-jour. If I had music in MP3 and wanted to move it to Ogg, it would sound ugly, and vice versa. This way I can store my music on my HDD, but still be able to use whatever format I need for my DAP or other device.

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

The reason I use FLAC is not for rebuilding my CDs in pristine state, but to more easily enable transcoding to the format-du-jour. If I had music in MP3 and wanted to move it to Ogg, it would sound ugly, and vice versa. This way I can store my music on my HDD, but still be able to use whatever format I need for my DAP or other device.

Yep very true. It is the best archiving format for sure (since it is lossless compared to MP3, Vorbis, etc.). Unfortunately, I don't think I have the disk space to put all my CDs into FLAC at the moment. Still that would be the ideal as you would only have to manually rip the physical CD once...

Of course this will all be moot once the media companies get it into their heads to stream everything on-demand in lossless format for a monthly subscription, micropayments, whatever. Then no one will have need for a private collection, and it will end all the *IAA attacks against customers...

Why would I need a bazillion CDs or DVDs around if I had the on-demand option? If they offered it at a price the market would bear it would revolutionize & revitalize their industry...

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

> 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?

Because most people aren't pretentious audiophiles, and are quite happy to listen to 128kbps MP3s through the crappy speakers that came with their Gateway box.

Cool! I've always wanted to be a pretentious audiophile! This is a great day! I just wish I had the gear to go along with such an ostentatious title. [sigh]

The treble washout at 128kbps is often times just too much. Have you ever tried to make an audio CD from 128k MP3s? It will generally turn out to be hideous. That's not always the case. I made one from the Brad Sucks: I Don't Know What I'm Doing album and it rocks! Guess I'm not as picky as you would imply--though others would be, for sure. Still you don't have to have a golden ear to be disturbed with lower bitrate MP3s, even on crappy Gateway speakers...

Listening to low quality MP3s can be kind of comparable to the Uncanny Valley effect some people experience when they see photorealistic CG images of humans. They can look really cool but still creep you out at the same time...

Re:FLAC

[chronicon]

FWIW, I threw together a simple how-to on setting up CDex to use FLAC.

Guess what I am doing (over) today? LOL

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 of around $1/CD

[PhunkySchtuff]

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

Re:Cost of around $1/CD

[Petrushka]

One of the good things about your legal system (if you're in the USA, which is statistically likely) is the presumption of innocence. If no one's been charged, which they haven't, and if the service has not been shut down or blocked by your own country's legal system, which it hasn't, then there is a very strong presumption that it is legal. I think that's just neat. It would be sad if everyone gave up their freedoms as easily as you do!

Re:Cost of around $1/CD

[cciRRus]

"download full albums for $1.00-$1.50"

Downloading songs that I already own the CDs, at $1.00-$1.50 for each album? What a rip off!

Re:Cost of around $1/CD

[Kjella]

Downloading songs that I already own the CDs, at $1.00-$1.50 for each album? What a rip off!

Since allofmp3.com doesn't know whether you have the CD or not, you are getting a completely independent copy. You can sell your used CDs if you will. The parent was simply pointing out that the price of buying another copy is comparable to using these services.

Re:Cost of around $1/CD

[cciRRus]

"The parent was simply pointing out that the price of buying another copy is comparable to using these services."

I was just trying to play around with a pun. Oh well, guess it didn't work.

Took me two weeks

[Centurix]

Ripping my CD's (~450) to a minimum of 192kbps using CDex, you can rip from two drives at the same time, put two CD's in, eyeball the CDDB entries, press rip. Then from that point I go do something else, pop in every few minutes, change CD's rinse and repeat. Worked ok.

Why pay?!?

[RingDev]

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

Re:Why pay?!?

[thatguywhoiam]

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.

Nothing wrong with that. But I gotta say, iTunes is even better in this department. You can set it to automatically rip the disc (to codex/bitrate x) when the disc is inserted, and eject automatically when finished. I did my CD collection this way; basically when I went to watch a movie or was reading, I'd just open the laptop next to me and put in the next disc when I heard the whir of the last disc ejecting. No clicking at all.

Re:Why pay?!?

[glitch0]

According to a post I read earlier in this article it kills CD drives quickly. I don't actually know if this is true, but it would be interesting to find out. Not that I'll ever use anything other than allofmp3.com anymore, but still curiosity pervades me.

Re:Why pay?!?

[AlexMax2742]

If you like iTunes, you'll love Foobar2k. I use it to rip all of my CD's to Musepack -standard, get tags, apply ReplayGain, and sort it how I like it. It also has the advantage of not being nearly as resource/memory intensive as itunes or WMP 10.

Re:Why pay?!?

[jb.hl.com]

YES.

I was about to reply with this...foobar2000 is my favourite CD ripper/music player bar none. It works with 99% of formats (I even got it to play and encode WMA), it can transcode formats, it's small, fast, light and just works. Love it.

Give it a go, you might just like it :)

Re:Why pay?!?

[thatguywhoiam]

If you like iTunes, you'll love Foobar2k.

Thanks for the suggestion... I have seen Foobar2k but my home machine is a mac, so no go.

Re:Why pay?!?

[LordKronos]

Nothing wrong with [Windows Media Player 10]. But I gotta say, iTunes is even better in this department. You can set it to automatically rip the disc (to codex/bitrate x) when the disc is inserted, and eject automatically when finished

Exactly the same with Windows Media Player 10.

I just ripped my 450 CD collection last weekend. I also decided to make it easier. I wrote a program that can monitor the CD drives. It can detect when a drive is loaded/ejected, and it can issue the load/eject command itself. Took me about an hour to learn how, code it, and debug it, but that was time I considered fun/educational (I love learning how to code new things, even if the knowledge probably isn't very reusable). With the program, you place a CD in each tray (leaving the tray ejected), and press a button in the program. It loads the first tray, waits for it to eject, loads the second tray, waits for it to eject, then plays a wave file when it's all done. I put 2 CD drives in each of 2 computers. Loaded up all 4 trays, clicked the button on each machine, went into the other room, waited until I heard the wave file played twice, went back into the room, and repeated.

25 CDs ripped free!

[SydShamino]

I've already ripped most of my CDs because - you know - I listen to them. But there are maybe 20-30 left that I've never gotten around to. Some are my wife's musicals, a few instrumentals, some old pop music I don't care much for right now but might some day.

One of these companies offers a 25 CD free "trial". Given that it's free, I'd be crazy to not try it.

Unless you are very obsessive about the formatting of your ID3 tags or the exact codec used, how many other people wouldn't want to take them up on this free offer?

Re:25 CDs ripped free!

[The Wicked Priest]

For 25 discs, I think it'd be more convenient to just rip them myself then take the time to sign up and send them in. It takes me literally five minutes and two clicks to rip a CD with Grip. I've done about 200 so far, essentially my entire collection.

Cheaper solution.

[pimpsoftcom]

emerge grip && echo -e "\a"

Re:rip quality?

[DaveCar]

cdparanoia? with the right options it produces a lovely log file with all read, re-reads, jitters, etc. just waiting to be read by an quality analysis program (qaparanoia in my case).

Not a complete solution

[agslashdot]

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!

Wierd

[Chuck Chunder]

Why does that particular post not have the [thepiratebay.org] after the URL like posts normally do (assuming you have that option checked in your profile)?

Re:Wierd

[Lehk228]

it does, maybe your profile settings or cookies got hosed?

Re:Wierd

[Chuck Chunder]

I see it on other posts, just not that one....
Strange....

The Prize

[Stan Vassilev]

Designtechnica compares a number of CD ripping services, the winner receives legal pursuit by Sony BMG. "We've plenty of those right now, so we don't mind sharing one" - explained Sony.

Lazy?

[Stan Vassilev]

It's amazing that so many services pop up based on the preference of the average coach potato to send his CD-s long distance shipping, pay for the pleasure and download mp3-s from remote location...

Compared to what? Well ripping the CD with auto-generated meta from CDDA DB within minutes. Amazing.

for Windows

[mrbobjoe]

I've been using:
for %1 in (*.wav) do lame --alt-preset standard "%1"
from cmd.exe for a while.

Re:for Windows

[Nasarius]

You know, you can download Cygwin and get a real shell.

Re:seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Yum, meatadata. :-)

true for other things too?

[commodoresloat]

Hmmm... why pay a hooker for a handjob when you can just jerk off for free?

Re:true for other things too?

[Comatose51]

Someone mod him up, +5 insightful! He just saved me a bundle of cash!

Re:true for other things too?

[brogdon]

I think the paradigm here is that you'd mail your member off to the service, they'd jerk it for you at their location (within 7-10 business days) and then mail it back to you.

Of course eventually all these businesses will be outsourced to India, and genital jetlag is not something to be taken lightly.

Re:true for other things too?

[raoul666]

And that, my friend, is why blowjobs are the bread and butter of the prostitution industry.

Re:true for other things too?

[bxbaser]

That was realy funny.
Your absolutly correct
Now that ive stopped jerking off where the hell do i find a hooker...in iowa that accepts bread and butter as payment ?

Re:true for other things too?

[pintomp3]

you could also sit on your hand til it goes numb and then jerk off so it feels like someone else is doing it. damn, forgot where i heard that one. sorry, can't verify if it works though.

Re:true for other things too?

[pinkuff]

yak! I just fell off my chair laughing at this one - my coworkers are wondering what's the matter.
Best.Ever.

Re:true for other things too?

[orasio]

sorry, can't verify if it works though.

It's better if it's your non-dexterous hand.

But could you elaborate why you can't verifiy it?
Do you lack some of the appendages required ?
Or the experience to compare #1 with #2 ?

Re:true for other things too?

[monkeyfamily]

yeah, but it's in the OSPD, so it's good enough for me!

Re:seriously

[DaveCar]

heh, yes - something of a superfluety(???) of vowels there, and 'to's too. doh.

Buyer beware

[saperl]

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.

Re:Buyer beware

[aans]

They would manually tag your cds... oh no! they are doing what you paid them to do! the world is going to END!.

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.

Re:Cost effective - hire someone else!

[The Wicked Priest]

But it's not like you have to babysit the thing for the whole five minutes. You start the rip process, then you go and do other things (whether that's physically going, or just going to another window). So that's really only seconds per disc. No way your time is worth that much. Meanwhile, you're ignoring the time you spend shipping the CDs to the ripper. I daresay that's more than the active time you'd spend ripping it yourself.

You may have a point about clueless users; but timewise, this is no bargain for anyone.

Re:Cost effective - hire someone else!

[iainl]

Other than the part where you grab the disc off the shelf and insert it in the player at the beginning, and take it out and put it back at the end, the process is either automated (the actual rip and conversion) or I'd want to check myself (that the tagging is how I'd want it).

Furthermore, grabbing the disc of the shelf, putting it somewhere, then taking it back to the box and onto the shelf again, is something I'd need to do if I was packing the discs up to go get ripped elsewhere.

All in all, this looks like more effort (you've got to visit the post office with a heavy pile of 1000 CDs) rather than less to me.

Re:Cost effective - hire someone else!

[calethix]

"All in all, this looks like more effort (you've got to visit the post office with a heavy pile of 1000 CDs) rather than less to me."

duh! Pay someone to do that for you too.
I ripped all of my CDs myself. I don't have a huge collection (just under 100) so it wasn't that big of a deal and now that's the first thing I do when I buy a new CD. I could see if I had 1000 CDs, maybe I'd look into one of these services but personally, I don't see that it's worth it for the average person.

I always like arguments about how much someone's time is worth. If the grandparent's time is worth too much to rip a CD, wtf are they posting on slashdot for?

Re:Cost effective - hire someone else!

[elgatozorbas]

Well, my friends, there are people on the worlds who value their time at more than $60USD per hour...

Not around here (Europe). In my business (engineer, 30) $2500 would be a very nice net month's salary. If you count 20 working days per month, 8 hours a day, you make below $16 per hour.

I am not saying these CD ripping services are overpriced, but I won't easily trade an hour's work for 60 bucks.

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:Problems and Scratches

[barefootgenius]

If you are on windows, have a look at media monkey. Searchs amazon for the cd and, if you approve, it tags the file and downloads the album cover. With the bought version you can also auto-rename the filenames (eg; artist - album - # - track.ogg). Saved me a lot of time anyway.

Re:Problems and Scratches

[The Wicked Priest]

I'd bet that you're wasting your time with error correction and checksum validation. I started out doing it that way, then tried turning it off, and found that I still got perfect rips, in a fraction of the time. (This is with Grip under Linux, though, not EAC.) I did have a few problem discs, but I couldn't rip them either way. I've yet to find a single disc where it makes a difference on my current system. (I used to see a difference sometimes, long ago -- when I had a 4x drive and a 486, for example.)

Re:Problems and Scratches

[wenchmagnet]

Actually paying your kids to do it, even if they're a bit expensive, is a great idea.

You can pay them and make a ROTH IRA for them...

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Taxes/Preparat iontips/P33215.asp

Re:Problems and Scratches

[Nine99]

Have you ever considered using http://musicbrainz.org/ to tag your music? They are trying to build up a "perfect" tag and music db.

Re:Problems and Scratches

[fncll]

Point taken, but there's just enough of an error rate that if I rip in burst mode or otherwise disable error correction I get a bad rip here and there, which is supremely annoying. I just decided to do it right.

Of course, a lot of people are quite happy with the generally low quality they get on the open file sharing networks, so it would be way overkill for them-- and it depends on hardware and disc condition.

Re:Problems and Scratches

[chillywillycd]

i used FYCD. I know that they do some serious work making sure tags are handled properly and appropriately...

Re:Problems and Scratches

[greg1104]

I've got about 1500 CDs to convert, some of which go back to when I started buying in 1984. In the first 50 I've done on a test run, selected as a random mix from various time periods, two of them had subtle error problems that required me to either clean the CD or get another one altogether to get a perfect read. One was flagged by the drive's C2 error detection, the other was only caught only by a comparison using the AccurateRip database (luckily a high percentage of the really old and well played CDs are in their database already). Don't know if that will remain consistant or not, but at that rate I expect 40 glitches per thousand albums converted.

As the parent's collection is even larger than mine, I'll bet his has been around the block with scars to prove it as well, and therefore I think his vigilance is fully justified. The main reason I'm just getting started with this project right now is that I've only recently become satisfied that enough databases are available for me to be confident my rips are accurate.

Nobody rips to mp3 anymore

[obarthelemy]

FLAC allows you to actually enjoy your music on your expensive stereo ;-)

WTF??? Ripping services???

[eno2001]

I don't get it. I ripped the 4000 CDs in my collection and it was pretty painless. Didn't take more than a year to do and I started with the albums I was interested in. After that point, I never played another CD straight again. I just rip everything I buy.

Drives do fine, and ways to cool more

[Kamiza Ikioi]

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.

Re:Drives do fine, and ways to cool more

[Black Acid]

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.

The processor encodes the audio, not the CD drive. Good CD ripping programs will pipeline the encoding and ripping.

CD jukebox Robot

[qwp]

I'd sure like one of those old school robots that would pick up cd's and place them in a indexed shelf.
sadly i'd prob dish out more for than then a car.

I did 4,000+ CDs myself, it took a couple of hours

[macslut]

I have a collection of 4,259 CDs. It took me a couple of hours to rip the CDs including lyrics.

Oh, it took my Mac almost a month to rip them, but why would I could cpu cycles as *my* time? iTunes makes ripping damn easy and with PearLyrics you can get lyrics automatically added (for songs it can find).

What I did was connect 3 external CD drives and I had 2 internal drives. I would then load up my trays with 5 discs. I had iTunes set to auto-import an eject.

Minimal effort and very rewarding. Even if I only had 1 drive, it would still have been very easy...but with the money I was saving, I could've not only bought additional drives, I could've bought a new Mac as well.

I simply can't imagine paying for the service...especially when it involves shipping the discs.

ruin your CD drive? You're an idiot.

[SuperBanana]

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.

This is the stupidest thing I've read on slashdot in a long, long time. Your CD drive "burnt" out because you used it too much? Why have I never heard of anyone else having this problem? Ever? Why has it that in 8 years of IT work, I've never had a user break their CD drive, period?

For another thing, the ripping company only has to rip one copy of each CD and then they store it on a server.

Okay. So why do you have to pay so much for them to go "oh, yup, he's got that CD"? And if they're not actually converting YOUR cd, sounds like false advertising to me.

Re:Dumb digital sampling question

[Quiet_Desperation]

I think you're mixing up amplitude and frequency.

16 bits is 65536 *levels* of amplitude.That's a difference of 15 microvolts per level for each volt of audio signal level. You think the human ear is going to differentiate between two adjacent levels? Not to mention that the level is always changing (if not, you have silence). Also, when you convert back to analog, the digital data is filtered which smooths it back out to, in theory, the original waveform.

Now for frequency, the top end of the human perceptual spectrum is about 22 KHz. All those nuances and tones and shading occur in that range. The Nyquist sampling rate to be able to perfectly reproduce (again, in theory) the original waveform is 2x your top frequency, so you sample at 44 KHz.

So you have your frequency spectrum covered, and way more amplitude levels than you need. Add some Reed Solomon error correction to account for scratches and other damage, and you have a decent audio standard despite what some audiophiles claim. When they were developing the standard, Sony and Philips even debated using 14 bit samples.

Nyquist

Ripping 15,000+ CDs

[quinnk]

I serve on the Board of Directors of a community radio station, and we have 15,000+ CDs in our library. We've discussed moving to digitally stored files, and haven't made a decision about when it's going to happen, but in the meantime, since this thread is here, does anyone have any suggestions as to the best way to go about doing this, without spending $1/CD?

Re:Ripping 15,000+ CDs

[raoul666]

Easy as pie. Get yourself a intern who wants to break into radio. Give him minimum wage, the 3-5am slot on the air, and as much coffee as he can drink. He'll have those CDs ripped in no time.

Re:Ripping 15,000+ CDs

[J0nne]

Whenever you play/buy a new cd, rip it, and throw it in the 'ripped' bin.

If you continue to do this in that fashion, you'll have FLAC/OGG/MP3's of every song you need after a few days already.

Maybe pay some guy to write a shell script that does everything automatically as soon as you put a disc in a drive (Or google for an app that already does this).

It's not like you can miss your cd's for a period of time, being a radio station (unless you plan on talking for a month on end).

Re:How about 700+ ?

[toddestan]

You obviously have enough time to post to slashdot, so I don't see what the problem is. Any modern computer can browse the internet and rip at the same time. Set up your ripping program to auto-rip whatever you put in the drive, and whenever you're killing time on slashdot just feed it a disk every couple of minutes. You'll be through that collection in no time. It'll even go quicker if you set up the computer just to rip to WAV initially (you just have to wait for the computer to read the data, not compress it too). Then before you go to bed, turn the computer loose on converting all of those WAV files to MP3 (OGG, AAC, whatever) while you sleep.

Cheapskate. Send them off to India.

[NotQuiteReal]

Think about it. A reasonably fast computer will rip a CD in under 5 minutes. Add some overhead for taking the disc out of the case, etc.... say 10 discs an hour.

Pay someone $6 an hour and you get $0.60 a disk - it is not like $1.00 a disk is some order of magnitude rip-off.

Generally stuff costs a certain amount for a reason.

Your 15,000 disks is approching a man-year of labor. What would you work for, for a year. What you can afford and what something is worth has no relationship.

Sorry, that's life.

There really is a market for this

[norminator]

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.

There are people for whom this is useful, but it's not your average Slashdot reader. Wealthy people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have people set up their home theaters and whole-house audio systems. The professionals that set these up will often install mp3-based music servers such as the AudioReQuest http://www.request.com/ or the Escient Fireball http://www.escient.com/. These installers will usually pre-load the music servers for their clients. A CD ripping service would be very useful for them, but not for the average slashdotter.

Re:There really is a market for this

[elmegil]

Fair enough. Why this qualifies as news for nerds still mystifies.

Re:Dumb digital sampling question

[beetlefeet]

You missed one point.

It's 16 bits per channel per sample yes, and that is only 65535 possible different values for that one sample yes. But there are 44 thousand samples recorded/played back per second.

Sound is only variations in air pressure. At any one instant in time the pressure is at a particular single level (per channel). So you only need one value for each instant of time. And for human ears 44 thousand times in one second is enough. And 65535 discreet levels is enough to represent the sample. (though some people would say they prefer higher).

It's like, how many different shades of gray do you need for a black and white photograph? You might only need 256 shades of grey to show a very convincing picture (the huge majority of computer monitors can only show 256 different shades of gray).

But basically most musicians should be familiar with the notion that sound can be represented as a waveform. A sound waveform is basically a drawing of how the speaker paper moves over time. Digitizing a waveform is just a case of recording the height of the wave to a certain accuracy (16 bits) every so often (44k times per second).

Audacity is your ripping friend

[shoolz]

How timely... I just wrote an article on how you can rip anything that is piped through your sound card.

Shameless self-promotion:

How to capture audio from any source

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

Um, this CD drive thing...

[modecx]

Are you referring to the coffee holder? Because I've seen a few of those broke in my time...

Re:As a record store owner

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is why this troll will live on forever. It never fails to bait someone.

Urr?

[Draconix]

Next thing you know, they'll start trying to sell us in bottles what comes out of our faucets. ...wait.

Re:rip quality?

[fmaxwell]

One major problem with cdparanoia is that it does not work properly with many modern CD drives that sport large audio caches. It does two reads, but the data fits into the drive's cache. It then declares a "pass" for the read when, in fact, the physical read was done only once and the second read came out of the cache. This causes it to miss errors that EAC catches.

Also, EAC is far more user-friendly and convenient, with automatic freedb CD look-up, offset detection, ID3 tagging, and one-button rip+encode (if you want to compress the tracks). Yes, I know that it's possible to string a large number of Linux programs together with shell scripts, but that's hardly as convenient.

deliver a box of DVDs

[real_smiff]

isn't such a rich person also going to want the files copied to their computer afterwards? seems like the company ought to send a tech 'round with the box of burnt DVDs to import those damn files into iTunes or whatever, and get the tagging how the person likes. (i'm serious, someone who can't/won't rip won't want to do this step either!).

Re:I did 4,000+ CDs myself, it took a couple of ho

[real_smiff]

the Mac must be kinda neat to handle 5 rips going on at once. my 2Ghz PC has enough trouble with one (EAC) at a time. just curious if anyone knows a good way to do that on a PC, or if my system is just set up wrong (you need SCSI drives or something to lower cpu usage?)

I wonder what happens...

[Macdude]

I wonder what happens if you sent in a bunch of CD-R mixes?

Try ripping 5000 discs.

[cphil674]

Jeez.... you buncha pansies. Me and the gf have a combined 5000 disc collection, so something like this has alot of draw for us. Christ, just ripping the CDs alone would take 400 solid hours (minus the 200 discs we've arelady done) without breaks or hardware failure. Of course, that means it would cost $3800 to rip them (at .79c per disc), but that's money well spent to to have all our schtuff in digital formats.

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[GrumblyStuff]

I'm sorry. You'd spend $3800 to get them ripped?

Shit man, I'd do it for $2000 and send you the copies on a harddrive and DVD-Rs.

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[iainl]

Do you spend a lot of time sat in front of your machine while doing something that doesn't hog all the CPU (i.e. not playing games)?

Because the getting the discs off the shelf and putting them back parts obviously still need to be done here, and you probably shouldn't trust most of these companies to do a better job of tagging than iTunes does (which is a pretty good job, to be fair). At which point it's only a question of whether packing them all up and taking them to the post office, as well as unpacking them once they come back, is less or more effort than switching window to see that everything looks right every couple of minutes before going back to what you were doing.

Yes, I'd quite like my 1000+ disc collection to be on my drive without any more effort as well. But these services seem to involve most of the effort of what it would take to do myself anyway.

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[freeweed]

What I don't get is the number of posts to this story like this one. You have 5000 CDs (an impressive collection!) and you're ripped 200 of them?

I started ripping my CDs over 5 years ago, when I had something like 3-400 sitting around, and the constant "remove 5 from changer, insert 5 new ones" started becoming a huge hassle. It's been several years at least since I've owned a CD for more than a week without it being ripped.

Who are you people who've been sitting around for years, blissfully buying hundreds of CDs a year, and never thinking "hey, maybe storing these on the computer would be a good idea"? I'd imagine anyone who owns thousands of CDs probably listens to music constantly - hasn't it occured to you to go mp3 before this?

Am I just too much of a geek? :)

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[cphil674]

The majority of discs we own are from her stint as an enployee at Peaches Music store (~5 years ago). The gf wasn't as tech oriented until we started dating, so she didn't own an iPod (or computer, even) until about a year ago. Every CD we've bought since then, however, gets ripped immediately after purchase. Besides, when she got her iPod (a 20GB one), she wanted to listen to all the new CDs she had bought up to that point, not the stuff in storage.

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[cphil674]

As long as you check the metadata and make sure it's spelled right/cataloged correctly, I'd say you got yerself a business plan there... ever thought of incorporating? ;-)

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[cphil674]

The big question is... how do I share our growing mp3 collection? We're at 90GB and growing. How can we share the collection between us easily? Right now it's sitting resident on her computer. I was going to just buy a 400GB drive and put it on there and forget, but would a NAS be better? Oh wait, iTunes doesn't play well with network shares... :-( Anyone have an idea?

Re:Try ripping 5000 discs.

[GrumblyStuff]

Sshhhhh. You'll wake up the IRS.

You mean....

[_Griphin_]

I can make money ripping CDs?!?

Mail your out of print/rare music?

[scottsk]

Timely article, because I've just been ripping. A lot of the music I have is out of print or very difficult to get (imports, etc). I'd be reluctant to mail/fedex/etc anyone my CD collection, because I've spent years collecting what is now rare music and would be in bad shape if it was lost/damaged/etc.

Of course, I have made a set of who-cares-if-it-gets-scratched Maxell CDPro copies of my favorite mix CDs (albums, rarities, you name it) for everyday wear and tear listening -- I could send those, but to make the custom mixes, I had to rip the CDs in the first place :) So a batch run of lame and oggenc took care of that overnight...

Re:Santa Q. Claus

[pla]

For one thing, ripping an entire CD collection in a row is a great way to ruin your CD drive.

Perhaps with a crappy $25 drive (though even if a cheap drive did die, I'd consider that a fair enough expense to have my entire collection ripped), but otherwise? I've ripped over 1500 CDs with my current drive (a Pioneer A06), and it still reads and writes just fine.

I do, however, limit it to ripping at 8x, because I find that for anything but a perfect CD, it actually extracts the audio faster at that speed than at a higher theoretical speed needing far more reseeks. For some really badly scratched discs, I've even limited it to rip at 1x, but on those sort of discs, you have almost no shot of getting a clean rip anyway (so I rip those to MP3 rather than FLAC, to let me know later that I need to replace them in my collection when I get a chance).


especially in laptops.

Now that I won't dispute. Laptop drives, while "cute", absolutely suck for heavy use. And they don't come in a cheap $25 model, either. Short answer, just don't use laptops for ripping.


For another thing, the ripping company only has to rip one copy of each CD and then they store it on a server.

Hmm, now y'know, that makes me wonder... Rather than needing to find and borrow a "good" copy of the above-mentioned badly scratched discs, I wonder... If I got together the dozen or so in my collection and sent them to such a ripping company, would I actually get good rips back?

Of course, in my case - Probably not. I generally only tolerate such badly scratched discs in the first place because they count as extremely rare, basically irreplacable (including a few given to me privately by the artist - Of all the people to appreciate proper storage of music, you'd think the musicians themselves would learn NOT to use paper envelopes for CDs).

Re:rip quality?

[MooUK]

Just turn on CDParanoia in CDex, and you get all that automagic as well.

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.

Postal Pilfering

[Ilex]

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.

Re:Postal Pilfering

[PFI_Optix]

Here in the 'States, postal theft is taken very seriously. The USPS has an army of Postal Inspectors whose sole job it is to catch employees in the act of theft. IIRC, tampering with the mail is a felony here and can quite easily land you prison time.

My father works for the USPS. At his office they had a guy pick up a Playboy magazine off the line, stuff it under his shirt, and walk out on his lunch break. He walked out the back door straight into two Inspectors who recovered the mail, promptly fired him, and held him for the police to pick up. That's the only known case of attempted mail theft.

In a modern post office here there are raised, enclosed walkways that cover the entire processing floor. These walways have one-way windows placed so that there is nowhere on the floor you can hide. The entire system has a separate entrance so that employees can't see inspectors coming or going. Basically any person in any office could be observed at any time, and they never know whether there's even an inspector present. It's a very effective deterrent.

If you buy insurance for something you ship with USPS, it's put in a seperate "cage" for handling, and only certain employees can even touch it. My father once had a $250,000 stock certificate come through; he personally carried it from the front counter to the insured mail area and had the Postmaster watch him place it in the hands of the guy handling certified mail. They take personal responsibility seriously there.

Exact Audio Copy

[Supersonic1425]

I've tried numerous CD ripping programs (although none of the ones featured in that article), and Exact Audio Copy is by far the best one I've used. It even gets around some forms of copy-protection thanks to its error correcting feature. It takes longer to rip a CD than most other programs, but the quality is unmatched. Add freedb lookup and automatically configured LAME encoding (once you download the encoder itself) and you've got the best CD ripper in the market. Oh, and it's completely free. 100 million pirates can't be wrong.

Re:Exact Audio Copy

[TractorBarry]

And whilst you're promoting Exact Audio Copy don't forget to also mention the Uberstandard for mp3 rips. It's a damn good idea.

'cause there's nothing worse than badly encoded mp3s ! (oh alright getting a paper cut on your Glans would be far, far worse than a badly encoded mp3 but you know what I mean...)

Re:Exact Audio Copy

[adamgolding]

Mod parent up! if you're ripping on windows EAC is really the *only* option, especially if you want to rip archival copies to FLAC--it can often guarantee bit-perfect copies, and it can read past a lot of scratches that other rippers will choke on--that's right, it can fix scratches digitally, essentially. Forget brasso, as another poster mentioned...

i dare anyone on here to show me a better ripper for windows! (yes, i hear cdparanoia is good for linux)

Why I didn't use RIPDigital

[dpbsmith]

They were one of the very first services and I would have been one of their earliest customers.

I had spent several years transferring my LP collection onto Music CD-R's via a Home Audio CD Recorder (the clas of device for which the Audio Home Recording Act of 1991 was designed). I had carefully printed adhesive labels for each and was starting to get concerned about stories that adhesive labels cause premature CD failure, so, rather than copy them CD by CD I decided to send them to RIPDigital for ripping.

Everything was all set... then I suddenly got an email from RIPDigital refusing to do it. They said they would only RIP from actual commercial CDs and would not make any exceptions. I suggested that I could send them my scans of the LP album covers, ringwear and all, as proof of ownership.

Uh-uh.

My CDs had been placed on the spindle, the package was sealed and awaiting UPS pickup. The only good thing about the transaction was that they managed to let me know just in time for me to prevent UPS from picking it up and sending my precious CDs on an unnecessary and fruitless round-trip...

They do direct-to-iPod

[Kadin2048]

Well at least one of them will put the resulting files on a hard drive for you (I assume you supply the drive), so if you were truly lazy then you could just send them a FireWire hard drive and plug it in to your computer when it was returned to you.

Or if you can bear to part with it for a week or so, and trust the ripping company with it, send them your iPod itself and have the files loaded directly onto that. You know that's what most people who get a service like this are going to be doing with the music as soon as they get it home (as other people have pointed out, if you use your desktop computer like a stereo system this doesn't make much sense, because you can just rip+play at the same time, as you listen to each disc), so it's not much of a stretch to imagine that most people would just get the music preloaded onto their iPod.

If a lot of people do just get it loaded onto their iPods though, I could forsee a big interest in tools that let you get the music off of the iPod easily -- since otherwise you're carrying around your $1 a disc investment in ripping in your pocket without a backup. If the iPod were to die, you'd have to get all the CDs re-ripped.

OT: No domain on link

[Kadin2048]

Yeah that's interesting. I'm seeing the same thing, all the other links have the domain in brackets after them, but that one doesn't. Odd, I thought it was a setting on my end to choose that, not on the poster's.

Re:OT: No domain on link

[dada21]

Weird. I didn't do anything different. Someone tell Taco :)

Liner notes?

[michaelmalak]

Do any of the services scan the liner notes? For that matter, can any of the audio players automatically display scanned liner notes associated with a song? Is there any standard format for scanned liner notes?

How do they get the tagging right?

[rjforster]

Some (most?) of the services want you to send the CDs to them on spindles. I have several CDs that not only don't have track names on but some don't have album names or even band names on. If the cddb is wrong or has a few different choices[1] that are not just spelling variations then how do they make sure your tracks end up being tagged correctly?

[1] This happens more for CD singles but I think I've seen it for regular albums.

in all fairness...

[Daytona955i]

It's not exactly the same as bottled water. There are times when I've been out and I've been thirsty and I didn't want a bunch of flavored carbonated sugar with some water mixed in, so I opt for the bottled water instead of the water fountain that looks like a science experiment.

Also many homes water tastes like chlorine and requires you to have a filter. I guess some people don't want a filter so they opt for bottled water instead. Granted it's still a silly idea, get a water filter for home and then just use a sports bottle of some sort to carry it with you.

Not much of a comparison...

[ZipR]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Price Comparison

[stealie72]

My take home pay for two weeks is less than it would cost to convert my 1200 CD collection (which I'm going to be doing this winter).

Thusly, are these companies thriving on people with small collections who can't be bothered to rip their 120 CDs? Shouldn't they be more likely to rip the CDs themselves because it won't be a deathslog?

I ripped a couple hundred over a two week period two years ago. It was no big deal. While I'm doing my usual web roundup at night, pop in a CD, drag into my iTunes library, wait for the bing, put in a new CD, drag into my iTunes library, etc, etc, etc.

This is Why I Started Ripping My CDs in 1999

[ferrellcat]

I'm nearly done now!!!

CD Queue Hardware

[Enonu]

Is there a company out there that makes a device that can take spindle of CD's as input, run as script for each cd, and then put the finished cd's in an output spindle? It'd be great for this type of task or for when you have a ton of data that you'd love to burn off, but don't want to babysit the whole process.

It's been done

[pnakotus]

If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they?

"The Listener's License was created by the conglomerates. They all got together If you wanted to see a movie, hey if you had your listener's License you could get in for 2dollars. (chuckle) 2 bucks. Oh you don't have a Listener's License, well you can't get in. Se they couldn't control the piracy so they stopped it at its source If ever you were found to be a pirate or if your computer was ever found to have MP3's that weren't appropriate on it you were eliminated, your listener's License was revoked and you were out of the loop. Its all private enterprise, you don't have a right to music, you never had a right to it. Its all private."

Re:As a record store owner

[srchestnut]

You have to be particularly evil to steal Christian rock, in which case why would you want it?

AutoRip in the background

[SailFly]

I rip my CD's on my Linux server using AutoRip which has no UI, and runs in the background. It does CDDB lookup and tag encoding. It's a PERL script that uses cdparanoia and lame to create the MP3 files.

Not very sophisticated or trendy, but works great for my purposes. I just keep a stack of "todo" CD's by the server and when I see the tray open, load a new CD. Then add the ripped disc to to the "done" stack.

It took me 2-3 weeks to rip my CD's which is not a problem for me since:

1. I don't need everything ripped immediately (practice patience)
2. I used none of my primary time - wasn't a priority.

works for me...

Re:OT- slide scanning

[dolo724]

I did the same thing for my parents, without the benefit of a carousel-scanner adapter. I have an Olympus ES-10, parallel/SCSI. I used parallel, Win98 to drive it, had no problem other than it was slow. Does slides and negatives with adapter/holder, nice scanner, okay software.

I was bummed 'cuz I didn't know enough about Linux at the time to make it work on my own machine, I had to use my kid's old game box. yech.

Mod parent up!

[jred]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Just make sure they wear gloves to keep their grubby little paws from messing up the discs :)

And to the gp post: My (ex)wife not only slept w/ "little man", her childhood stuffed doll, she sucked her thumb. According to my daughter, she still does both...

Re:I did 4,000+ CDs myself, it took a couple of ho

[MightyYar]

The "abcde" script for Mac or Linux (cygwin maybe?) can even handle distributed encoding. The sequence is:

1. insert disk
2. type "abcde" at command line
3. freedb is queried for the tags
4. disk is ripped with cdparanoia
5. disk is ejected (at this point you can insert a new disk and type "abcde" again)
6. mp3s are encoded, distributed amongst machines on the network so configured.

On my G5, the disks take about 5 minutes each to rip and much longer to encode... but it is all going on in the background, so who cares how long it takes? I usually load it up while I work, and then find out by the next morning that the encoding is all done. 1 work day gets at least 80 CDs ripped if you are attentive. I was through my whole collection in no time.

Note that it's not like I was hovering over the computer the whole time. If I didn't get around to loading in a new CD for an hour it was no big deal since the encoding was still going anyhow.

Re:Dumb digital sampling question

[labratuk]

16 bits is 65536 *levels* of amplitude.That's a difference of 15 microvolts per level for each volt of audio signal level. You think the human ear is going to differentiate between two adjacent levels?

Mmm. Doesn't quite work like that.

A 16bit sampled piece of audio will have a maximum theoretical dynamic range of ~96.3dB. Typical acoustic guitar playing for instance has a dynamic range of ~115dB. The human ear can hear a difference.

Re:Dumb digital sampling question

[Quiet_Desperation]

I was talking about ONE step between adjacent levels from, say 0x2F50 to 0x2F51, and not the full dynamic range (0x0000 to 0xFFFF).

KDE ripper quality settings

[00lmz]

The kioslave is cool, just that it has some annoying sides:

1. Can't set the compression quality

Run kcontrol (KDE Control Center) > Sound & Multimedia > Audio CDs. Look in the "MP3 Encoder" and "Ogg Vorbis Encoder" tabs. On my system (KDE 3.3.2, Debian sarge) the MP3 Encoder has controls for:

Encoding method Constant bitrate / Variable bitrate Stereo / Joint Stereo / Dual Channel / Mono A "quality" slider Options Copyrighted Original ISO encoding Write ID3 tag Filter Settings Lowpass filter, Highpass filter (things I don't understand) Variable Bitrate Settings Minimal bitrate Maximal bitrate Average bitrate

the Ogg Vorbis Encoder has a lot fewer options:

Encoding method Quality based / Bitrate based Vorbis Quality Setting A slider (like the -q parameter to oggenc) Options Add track information (track numbers?)

Review on iLounge

[RyanStrauss]

iLounge also performed a comparison. Moondog Digital and RipShark came out on top. http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/review_gr ades/C208

I have 1000 CDs.

[jotaeleemeese]

An need to rip them all. Now. At once.

Why?

Because I can.

1000 CDs ~ 1000 hours of music (1.3 months of uninterrupted listening).

Fucking posseurs.

Re:rip quality?

[fmaxwell]

Yeah, but you still don't get error-free rips with some drives (due to the cache issue).

Why spend more time setting up and configuring CDex, CDParanoia, etc., if you aren't guaranteed accurate rips?