Posted by Ablang on 11/15/75 11:25

August 30th, 2005

The Playlist: CD Ripping Services

Senior Editor Eric Dahl

Each time I look at a new MP3 player, I feel this urge to reboot my
music collection--to sacrifice a weekend or two and re-rip all my CDs
onto one system so I have everything in a consistent format. But
usually, one look at my rack of over 400 CDs banishes that thought
from my head. I sigh and stick with my disjointed collection, which
consists of a third of my music on my work PC, another third on the
home machine, and the rest still residing in good old reflective
plastic.

Judging from the e-mail I've been getting, I'm not the only one in
this situation. Many of you have written to ask about services like
IRip, MusicRip, and Riptopia, all of which offer to rip your entire CD
collection for you, usually for a fee of around $1 per CD.

IRip:
http://www.irip.biz/

MusicRip:
http://www.musicrip.com/

Riptopia:
http://www.riptopia.com/

Once you start thinking about how long it would take to rip 400 CDs,
it's natural to wonder if it might be better to pay someone to do it
for you.

But are these services legit? And are they a good deal? Before I'd
even think about loading my entire CD collection onto spindles and
shipping it off to some company I found on the Web, I'd want those
questions answered. That's what I'm doing this month.

First off, though, I have to apologize: This is going to be a bit of a
math column. Thankfully, it's the good kind of math--the kind where I
do it, so you don't have to.

How Do Ripping Services Work?

Many of these music ripping services offer an impressive full-service
approach. Send them your CD collection, and they'll give you your
music in almost any compressed format you want. You can opt to receive
your music on a hard drive, or on an Apple IPod or other portable
player that you purchase from the service. Many services even provide
custom-burnt DVDs for backup.

When you sign up with a music ripping service, you'll receive a bunch
of CD spindles and other packing materials that you use to ship your
CDs to the company. Shipping costs, including insurance for your CDs,
is usually included with the cost of the service.

At home, you remove your CDs from their jewel cases, place them on the
included spindles, and mail them to the ripping service. Then the
folks there do their work--usually in two to five days--and send your
CDs back to you along with compressed digital copies of your music.
Since the service doesn't keep copies of the music, the entire
transaction falls within your fair-use rights, which allow you to copy
your CDs for personal use.

If you decide to go with a service, pay careful attention to the
default bit rates it uses to rip your music. For example, by default
MusicRip produces MP3s compressed at 224 kilobits per second, while
Riptopia's default is a 160-kbps compression rate. Remember, you can
always transcode files to a lower bit rate if you want to save disk
space, but you can't increase the quality of a file without ripping
the disc again.

Music Ripping Math

So is all that a good deal? For most people, I don't think it is.
Riptopia, for example, charges $200 to rip a collection of 200 CDs. A
collection of 400 discs will run you about $400. Most of the other
services I've seen charge similar rates. Whether that's a good value
depends on the size of your music collection and how long it takes to
rip a CD.

To get a conservative estimate, I ripped several long CDs of 70
minutes or more using my work and home PCs--fairly standard machines
that are one year and three years old, respectively. These long CDs
each took a little under 4 minutes to encode in high-quality,
variable-bit-rate MP3 format that averaged around 180 kbps. Since the
average CD in my library runs about 45 minutes, I think it's
reasonable to assume that you'll be able to rip most CDs in around 2.5
minutes. Add half a minute to change CDs, and we're left with a
ripping rate of around 20 discs per hour.

That's not too bad, really. Spend 5 hours a day ripping CDs, and I'd
get through 200 CDs in one fairly boring weekend. And hey, if I really
bit the bullet, I could slog through my entire library in a couple of
deathly boring 10-hour marathon ripping sessions.

For most people, the question boils down to this: Would you sacrifice
one weekend to save yourself a few hundred bucks? I probably would.

Bulk Ripping Tips

Before you embark upon your bulk ripping session, here are a few tips
to get you started.

Don't Use ITunes. While it's a great music manager, its ripping speed
leaves a lot to be desired. I've found that CDex, the full version of
Winamp, and Yahoo Music Engine are all substantially faster. Once
you're done ripping you can import your tracks into ITunes if you'd
like.

CDex:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,6298,tk,box,00.asp

Winamp:
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,5556,tk,box,00.asp

Yahoo Music Engine:
http://music.yahoo.com/musicengine/

Choose Your Settings Carefully. You'll only want to do this once, so
take a few minutes before you begin to review the settings you'll use
to rip your CDs. Make sure you're ripping in a format that's
compatible with your portable player--when in doubt, choose MP3--and
choose a bit rate that's perhaps a little higher than you think is
necessary. I prefer variable-bit-rate MP3s that average around 200
kbps.

Use Error Correction. This may slow things down, but it can eliminate
the skips and pops you'd otherwise get if you're ripping CDs that are
scratched or smudged.

A Word on File Naming. Most MP3 rippers give you some control over the
file names and folder structure your MP3s will have. An
artist/album-type structure is standard. For file names, I recommend
putting the track number in front of the track name ("01 - Intro.mp3,"
for example) so you'll get the best results with a wide range of
portable players.

Bring a Book. Your PC won't require a lot of hand-holding while it's
ripping CDs, so there's no reason you can't have some fun while you
build your library. If you want to stick with the music theme, I'd
recommend reading Nick Hornby's "Songbook" (Riverhead Books, 2003,
800/526-0275), a beautiful little essay collection about some of
Hornby's favorite songs. It even comes with its own CD.

* In Heavy Rotation *

Pop Goes Scandinavia: I'm not sure when it happened or why, but
suddenly I'm all about Scandinavian pop bands. It probably has
something to do with the Swedish side of my family, but no matter
where your ancestors are from, you should check out the Shout Out
Louds and the Kings of Convenience. The former is a frenetic little
indie pop band that works some amusing little eighties touches into
their songs. The latter is a more laid-back affair fond of great album
titles like "Quiet Is the New Loud."

Shout Out Louds:
http://www.shoutoutlouds.com/

Kings of Convenience:
http://www.kingsofconvenience.com/

Visit PC World's Info Center to keep up with the world of digital
entertainment:
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/infocenter/0,ctrid,10,ic,DigitalEntertainment,tk,box,00.asp

Have a question or comment? Write to Eric Dahl:
playlist*pcworld.com

Read Eric Dahl's regularly published "The Playlist" columns:
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/columnist/0,colid,28,tk,bo,00.asp


===
"In a world where more than 10 million americans live with cancer -- we believe unity is strength, knowledge is power, and attitude is everything!"
-- Livestrong, by Lance Armstrong

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