There's a new company called RipDigital that will rip your entire CD collection into MP3s for a price. For $129 USD you can ship them up to 100 of your CDs and they'll ship them back along with a DVD containing your CDs as MP3s. Their site celebrates the act of ripping your entire CD collection with the following verbiage.
Unleash your music and you can:
- enjoy your entire music collection any time, anywhere: at home, while you travel, exercise, work
- keep your music collection organized perfectly by artist, album, genre or any combination
- create mixes and play-lists of hundreds of songs that play for hours without ever swapping a disc
I'm speaking from experience when I tell you they're right about the advantages of ripping your entire CD collection to MP3. I undertook this task last month and wrote about it extensively on this site. I feel extremely liberated having every song I care about ripped to an MP3 file I can take and use anywhere. It was a big task, but the end result was well worth it.
I ripped like a mad man for a solid week, all day long while I worked and all night long while I played. In the end, I ripped well over a hundred discs at a cost of some blood, sweat and tears. RipDigital's website will tell you not to waste your time. "Thinking about ripping your music collection at home? Brace yourself. At six CDs and hour for an hour a day, it will take you several months." Several months? Who are they kidding? One long week of my life and I was able to keep my $300+ Canadian dollars for something else. If you want to digitalize your CD collection, save your money and read what I did. The end result will look something like this. Feel free to contact me if you need help.
One line in particular that is posted on the RipDigital website was enough to prevent me from utilizing their service even if it was free of charge. "RipDigital actively encourages the responsible use of digital music by including uniquely identifiable information in each track converted." I'd want to know a whole lot more about this "uniquely identifiable information". That sentence alone would ensure I rip my own CDs regardless of the time and effort involved.
