Smart Home Lifestyle

October 7, 2006

CD ripping companies can take your music collection to a new digital level

In this Digital Age, the Principle of Ockham’s Razor hardly applies; when it comes to technology, there’s no “keeping it simple” about it. But, now thanks to the fusion of our PC’s and our A/V, combining formats has become much easier- especially when it comes to managing your CD collection.

“With over 14 billion CDs sold in the United States and an additional 600 million added per year into the foreseeable future, Riptopia is now positioned on a National level to help businesses and individuals alike convert their CD collections into commercial-grade digital music libraries,” said Dr. Kurt Beyer, President of Riptopia, Inc. “Riptopia’s service can process to a variety of technical standards, ensuring complete compatibility with the ever growing variety of digital music centers, music servers, digital car stereos, and mp3 players.”

CD ripping companies rise in popularity, now that digital files, like MP3, can easily translate between your computer and your DVD players, iPods, car stereos and boomboxes.

And making the transfer has never been easier. Simply mail out your CD’s to a ripping company and usually in less than a week, and for less than $2 for each CD, you’ll have a well-ordered digital music library.

According to Ready to Play (www.readytoplay.com), “When ripping an entire CD collection, many people ignore one of the most important aspects of their finished collection: consistent metadata (Artist, Album, Title, Release Year, Genre, etc.). To effectively use your collection, this data must be organized logically. With that, some online music databases are extremely inconsistent since the user-input data has come from thousands of different sources.”

And that’s not all these companies do. Get Digital (www.getdigitalinc.com) checks for errors, like scratches on your disk. They’ll even try to fix it by cleaning the CD and reprocessing it.

Riptopia (www.riptopia.com) gives the option of archiving your digital music on DVDs or even hard drives. Remember, a recordable DVD stores up to about 100 CDs- a huge space saver. Plus, they’ll even give you a free external hard drive in place of the DVDs for orders of 300 CDs or more.

So, what about MP3 players? Most CD ripping companies can load your iPod too. Just send it along with your CD collection and they’ll fill ‘er up with all your music. Get Digital even embeds album cover art into each MP3 tracks.

“What could be more fun than taking your new MP3 player home and having your whole library of music available and organized the minute you take it out of the box,” said Jeff Tedesco, President and CEO of Ready to Play. “Ready to Play has the technology and expertise to affordably convert and organize a customer’s CD music onto their MP3 player in a quality digital format.”

So, is it safe? While the thought of mailing out your prized CD collection may make you shudder, a reputable company leaves you covered. Riptopia, for one, gives the reassurance of between a $10 and $20 guarantee for each lost or damaged CD.

Author: Diana Kostigen, Marketing/Public Relations Director, Comtec