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?

[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?

[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?

[KermitJunior]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

[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.

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.

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

[ynohoo]

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

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

[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

[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?

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Cost effective - hire someone else!

[NotQuiteReal]

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

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

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

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

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

Chill out.

Problems and Scratches

[fncll]

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

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

Re: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 :)

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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