by George Ziemann

There's a story at Wired about a New York company that's offering a new service. For a fee, they will take your entire CD collection and turn it into mp3s for about a buck an album.

The NY outfit, RipDigital makes you send them all of your CDs and they send them back to you, along with a tidy, indexed version of your collection in portable mp3 form.

While it sounds perfectly legal at the outset, you know the recording industry is going to have a cow over this, as someone else is making copies and they're not getting paid for it.

Now that they are officially on the radar, I expect RipDigital to face the wrath of the music police by the end of the week.

Another company offering a service thats available for free and charging for it? This seems as mucha 'rip'-off as any of those other sites that do the same type of pay for free services business.

Sounds perfectly legal to me. Dubbing services have been in business for many years. Put "dubbing service" into google and you'll find a bunch of them.

well they must know that the RIAA is going to go after them so I'm sure they've done their legal footwork. This should be the same as those services that take family portraits (which are also protected under copyright law) and put them on disks for you to upload into your computer. Also didn't the courts rule it was ok to transfer legally purchased material to different mediums under fair use? IE taking a vinyl album and putting it on cassette. Also I don't remember anything from the industry during this whole download thing saying it wasn't ok to make back up files from your CD's on a computer.

lordperrin just because it can be accomplished free doesn't mean every one has the time or computer knowledge to do it. repairing your own computer software-wise can be free if you know what your doing, doesn't stop the millions of tech support reps from charging.

"well they must know that the RIAA is going to go after them"

The RIAA is not going to go after them. This was posted on the Velvet Rope a week or two ago, so the RIAA surely knows they exist.

"Another company offering a service thats available for free and charging for it?"

The world is populated by an enormous number of people who will pay someone else to do what they are perfectly capable of doing themselves. For some people, time is more valuable than the money.

Man, total time needed for ripping is less than 5 minutes (you have to spend only 1 minute and come back later to get the ripped songs)

excellent ripping tool (windows media player , seriously)

...and some people are just lazy.

If you had 1000 cd's you wanted to load on a hard drive and it took 5 minutes each that would be 5000 minutes or 83.33 hours. That's a lot of time.

"Another company offering a service thats available for free and charging for it?"

It's also why I buy stamps, saves me the time and money it would take to deliver the F'n mail myself.

Also, who is offering this service for free? I would love to dump my 7000+ cds on their door to rip for me for free!

So you're saying that you can't do anything else while you have your computer ripping your cds? I have over 700 cds (9/10 of which are independant I might add) and I can be just as productive while it's doing that as otherwise. I ripped a good 20 of them last night while I was working on some C++ code. Changing the cd and hitting the 'rip' button doesnt really take that much time. If you want to pay someone to do that, go ahead.

This would be a high-tech job that skilled musicians can do while waiting for their big label contract. NOT!!!

Outsource the ripping jobs to Bangladore. You can't get Americans to work for $2.50 a day.

Hey, the only reason you should buy an album is to have the an assurance of properly encoded/recorded songs arranged in an established order, the packaging and whatnot. I don't buy the music itself, nor a license to listen to the music. (If there were DRM restrictions I would'nt buy it!) I pay for the service of having it all neat and tidy and convenient and "done right." I don't pay for the "music." You listen to music for free! (Don't let anyone tell you otherwise!)

Copyrights do NOT make the song, image, story, (whatever it is)
into an "thing" that can be sold. Copyrights merely give the holder the "right" to make money from their work by giving them a monopoly on it.
That means that no one else can make a book, an album, or put the picture in a magazine (that utilizes or transmits the work) for a profit without permission or some form of compensation to the copyright holder.

The song, story, image, and idea itself is free!

The AHRA covers home-taping and stuff.
This falls under that provision in my book. It takes time and effort to rip and categorize an album collection. I would call this a legit service so long as they are not selling the rips to folks other than who ordered the service. (Then it WOULD be infringement!) But then again, the RIAA sucsessfully attacked the Mymp3 service. Hell, it is even a fairly good idea. If I had time and inclination and some decent printers and stuff, I might consider going into a similar competing business.

I am sure George is right... they WILL
hit these guys eventually if it is deemed worth the effort. Right now tho, the RIAA's mission is suing p2p users into submission and lying to the public about what is "legit" or not. They may not bother.

Shmoo, of Electric Gypsy
Support Local and Independent Music!

I know from burning our own band's music that doing a lot of CD-r's at home is a heck of a lot of work. When we can afford it, we outsource the job to save that time and effort and also get neat packaging and whatnot. Why can't you outsource the job of backing up your own CD collection if you so choose?

"along with a tidy, indexed version of your collection in portable mp3 form."

It seems that they are not just ripping them. They are organizing them for you as well. Ripping may be quick, but organizing all of it can be a pain in the butt for someone who is not into organizing their stuff. I have my stuff organized within an inch of its existence, but I'm a geek. Not everyone has the time nor the inclination to do all of that work. They just want to be able to enjoy it.

I've got a reasonable collection (about 3000, lps, cassettes, cds, 8-tracks) that translates into lot of time that I hae spent converting and organizing. I think I'd just as soon have let someone else do it. of course as a side benefit of doing this you could find music that other people are holding onto that might be kinda rare.. what would stop them from making 2 or three copies or even a master database. hmmmm, how do I get in on this action?

Lord, the time I save having someone else rip and organize is time I can be charging my clients for doing their projects.

5 min x 7000 cds = 35,000 minutes = 583.333 hours

583.333 x $60/hr = $35,000

$35,000 - $7000 = $28,000 of my time saved.

In fact, I might just hire a few high school kids and start my own ripping company.

You Also have to consider the ripping quality. Windows media player uses imho, inferior codecs to do it's job. FHG pro is the way to go if your doing mp3s. There's no point in ripping a cd if your not going to do it right the first time...

Here's a question. Does this ripping company keep a backup copy while converting the files? It says that they provide the customer with an external hard drive with their music on it, but what do they do if they are halfway through someones collection and the hard drive tanks or something like that. I can't think of one business out there that doesn't backup its work, even if they delete the files after they are done converting. Just a thought.

A buck an album? They better be ripped at 24-bit/192kHz.

And no DRM. period.

For good business practice sake, I would imagine they would rip 'em to any bit-rate you specify ...and I wouldn't worry about them bothering with any kind of DRM. It wouldn't make any sense to "copy protect" something like that.

...but then again, it doesn't make sense to use DRM at all.

Who knows?

Shmoo

Sounds legal-ish. Likely to attract some unwanted attention through. Bit like that company that rented films with all the sex and violence edited out for overconcerned parents

Quote from the site faq-

"Finally we include a unique identifying mark with each file to encourage responsible use of digital music. "