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Amazon AutoRip — 14 Years Late
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon just debuted a new service called Autorip, which grants you MP3 copies of music when you purchase the CD version. This is a technology people have been trying to introduce since 1999, but only recently have the record labels — and the courts — seen fit to allow it. 'Robertson's first company, MP3.com was one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley when it launched what we would now call a cloud music service, My.MP3.com, in 1999. The service included a feature called "Beam-It" that allowed users to instantly stock their online lockers with music from their personal CD collections. ... Licensed services like iTunes were still years in the future, largely because labels were skittish about selling music online. But Robertson believed he didn't need a license because the service was permitted by copyright's fair use doctrine. If a user can rip his legally purchased CD to his computer, why can't he also store a copy of it online? ... the labels simply weren't interested in Robertson's vision of convenient and flexible music lockers. So MP3.com was driven into bankruptcy, and the "buy a CD, get an MP3" concept fell by the wayside.'"
I would subscribe to magazine more if the E version was not attached to a crashy nasty app AND were less than or even the SAME AS a print subscription.
Cycle World, is about $9.00 a year for a mailed to me subscription, It's $11.99 on the ipad. yeah. BITE ME Cycle World, I'll just torrent the issues from Pirate bay.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You didn't rip anything. MP3 actually had loads of CD's already ripped and on their servers. You put in a CD in your PC, it would get some data off of it(effectively a hash) and then used that info to figure out which CD it was and allow you to stream the rip from MP3.com. So for they'd have a rip of say Led Zeppelin IV on their servers. Everybody that put that CD in their PC could access MP3.com's rip of Led Zeppelin IV and stream it but nobody who used the service was actually ripping their own copy of Led Zeppelin IV and putting it up on the MP3.com's servers.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
It varies depending on the album. Recent purchases I've made have been encoded using LAME 3.97 with its V0 setting (~245 kbps VBR), this seems to be the default for MP3s encoded by Amazon. One self-published album I grabbed that was MP3 only was 320 kbps CBR. The MP3's I've downloaded via the site and via the downloader are bit-for-bit identical.
It's a pitty Amazon isn't more forthcoming on what the encoding is before you buy it, but I'd imagine whatever album you grabbed was simply provided to them as a 128 kbps file from the source.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
if you mark the order as a gift, i.e. buy off a wishlist, it won't be added to your library