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Rip CDs Directly to Your iPod
Kevin writes "A company out of Taiwan has released a device that rips audio cds directly to your iPod. It converts them to MP3 and even does all the tagging for you." Zettabyte, the company producing the units, hopes to hit market within the year and while it could work for any MP3 player, it is being marketed exclusively for the iPod right now.
Another company beat them too it, called it iLoad.
http://www.iload.com/index.html
They could be vaporware, but they were hitting the news sites in January. It didn't take long for an Asian company to rip off the idea though. Hopefully iLoad got a few patents in place first.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
How long til the RIAA finds this out and makes them disappear from the face of the earth. Good idea, but I have a feeling it won't hit the market, and if it does, it won't be there long.
Why do you say that? This isn't really any different than ripping to iTunes on a computer and transferring it to your iPod. You have the physical cd that you purchased (well, possibly... it obviously works with burned cds too), you're just putting it right onto your iPod.
This just takes out the "computer" step.
However, other problems come up too... If a CD is ripped to the iPod, what happens when you plug the iPod into a computer? iTunes doesn't support iPod > computer, so the CD you ripped won't show up and, if automatic sync is enabled, the cd would be deleted.
It's not marketted at you. It's for people with a) no computer, b) an old computer that they'd rather not replace, but does not support the ipod, or c) use an alternative operating system in which ipod support is abysmal.
I can't really see a situation where I would have a need for something like this.
I can't think of more than a tiny handful of times in the past 6 years that I've wanted to rip a CD but haven't had a computer nearby. Furthermore, this thing looks heavy, or at least bulky, so what exactly are we supposed to do? Carry it around in a little pouch just in case someone has a CD we want to rip? You're probably going to need to keep it at home, which further negates the entire point of having one. iTunes - for all of the perplexing, intense rage people have towards it - is incredibly good at doing what this device does and it doesn't charge you a dime for the privilege.
On top of all this, the industrial designer obviously put this together on his lunch break or something as it just looks incredibly shoddy.
Firstly, because video compression is a very CPU-intensive process. While faster CPUs or custom hardware may improve its speed, neither is likely to be very cheap. It's not as if people are making it slow just for fun, you know. Secondly, ripping commercial DVDs is currently illegal in the US due to the DMCA, so you might understand the reluctance on the part of manufacturers.
It'll be slow as unholy fuck though. Encoding MP3s on my old 180MHz PPC 604e was 1.1x at best.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
There are absolutely no legal uses for a device like that here. The very job it is designed to do is completely illegal, even though most people still do it and no-one prosecutes anyone for it.
The problem is that we don't have legal fair use here, making everyone who has an iPod and most people with a CD burner or a VCR a criminal.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?