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?

[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?

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

[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

[MalusCaelestis]

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I digress.

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

Re:Jesus H. Christ

[elmegil]

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

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

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

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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.

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.