Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

[maxhodges]

I'm considering setting up a service to rip your CDs for you. Useful if you have hundreds of thousands of CDs, you can save weeks of time.

First I wanted to just get a sense for the demand. Let me know if you'd be interested in a service and how much per CD you'd be willing to pay!.

[schmidj]

Re: Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

Are you willing to sort out the conflicting and erroneous metadata that is on the various sites? Scan the album art? What about the CDs with no metadata? Are you willing to read it off the album art and manually enter it?

Dealing with metadata is a much bigger issue than actually ripping the CD's and the rips are almost useless without reasonably accurate metadata. Metadata is the bane of my existence...

[maxhodges]

Re: Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

Yeah I understand some people are very particular about that. But in my case, I have a few hundred CDs and it's not that important to be for each track title to be capitalized correctly, etc. I just use the defaults that dbpoweramp provides most of the time. It's good enough. There are more things i'd rather be doing in life than custodial work and librarian duties. Still, if that's important to you, there are third-party tag editors which could allow one to modify the meta-data post-rip. Using something like this: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ couldn't you edit tags after someone else has ripped your hundreds of CDs?

But form what I've seeing on these forums, it seems like a lot of people here seem to actually enjoy this kind of work. Maybe I could create a marketplace (like airbnb) so that people who enjoy doing it can do it for the others who rather pay someone to handle it for them!)

[schmidj]

Re: Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

But if I have to edit the tags, and for my eclectic collection, I often do (some percentage don't even display the metadata for the correct CD), I'm not saving any time by having someone else rip them. In fact it probably slows me down, as I have to open the metadata, physically locate the CD (which if I'm doing the ripping I have in my hand already), read the liner notes and scan the art (probably only 10% of my CD's have online album art). The actual ripping is the small part of the job. You also haven't said how you deal with bad/questionable rips and rips of CD's not in Accuraterip. One of the main reasons I'm reripping stuff is that when I originally ripped it using Winamp, more than 5% of the CD's had bad rips which I didn't discover until I started listening to them, then on my Ipod. Very annoying to listen to! For instance, of the non-acccuraterip CDs I now rip, of those which have rerip frames some significant percentage have audible errors on the rerip frames, they in fact are bad rips. I have to decide whether to leave the bad tracks in my collection, remove the track, or attempt to find another copy to rip.

If I'm going to pay someone to do this, I'd want a quality job, not something that takes me longer to straighten out than if I had done it myself instead.

And, you will eventually discover that at least reasonably accurate metadata is what makes your collection convenient to use. A note, even though I am careful to make sure my metadata is accurate (at least the title of the album and track are correct and the artists are correct, it is still full of inconsistencies, particularly with artists names and genres which mess up my players. Spelling errors, differences in format (Beetles; Beatles; The Beatles; Beatles, The; etc.) result in messed up searches, and if you can't find it in a search, you can't play it... I'm looking forward to the evolving Perfect Tunes to help me sort that out.

I don't enjoy this work, it is time consuming dogwork, but again, if I were to pay someone, I'd want the whole job done, not just the easy part. Also, I'm not sure I could afford to pay someone what it would cost to do this correctly, and finally, many of the Cd's I'm ripping are now available as downloads, and your price would have to be less than the cost of purchase of a fully tagged download.

[maxhodges]

Re: Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

OK well seems there isn't enough interest here. Just thought more people would rather outsource this work but yeah I see some of the challenges.

> You also haven't said how you deal with bad/questionable rips and rips of CD's not in Accuraterip

Seems like we couldn't do much except to attempt to clean or resurface and rerip if there are errors.

>And, you will eventually discover that at least reasonably accurate metadata is what makes your collection convenient to use

Yes of course, but in my experience the perfect match results are reasonably accurate.

>Beetles; Beatles; The Beatles; Beatles, The
To be fair wouldn't a search for "Beatles" return all of the above?

Sure some tracks could get named inconsistently like Sonata III vs Sonata Pt 3 vs Sonata 3 vs Sonata Part III vs Third Sonata, etc. but I think for the most part if we are aware that these naming issues exist you can manage to find the track one way or another right?

Why doesn't accurateRip simply identify that you own the CD and then let you patch download the data to patch your bad frames? I guess that would be a major licensing issue with the labels? It's too bad. I just re-purchases a couple CDs because they were scratched badly. Shame I can't just get a clean track since I already bought it once.

[garym]

Re: Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

Why doesn't accurateRip simply identify that you own the CD and then let you patch download the data to patch your bad frames? I guess that would be a major licensing issue with the labels? It's too bad. I just re-purchases a couple CDs because they were scratched badly. Shame I can't just get a clean track since I already bought it once.

CUETOOLS repair option will do this if the cd is in its database and there are not too many bad frames.

[daleyb]

Re: Send us your CDs; we rip them for you and mail them back

There are many services that will do this already.To be honest, i would never send my cd collection anywhere. schmidj Kind of Sums it all up very well. Iam sure even using a batch ripper machine you are going to have to go back and correct meta/art etc....Theres more to ripping a CD than just the Rip.A while ago I didnt get DBPA, Why I Even needed it (shock , Horror!!) .Computer shops didnt get why I needed to spend on a ripping software either.Of course now, I realise i would been a dead man walking and now get it.
The most Important thing in life is ones Time (no amount of money can buy it back).By getting DBPA "I RIP ONCE-RIP RIGHT"...if I do make any mistakes, I only have me to blame-no-one else.

it would however,be a better service if Someone could of explained DBPA And helped me set it up.(of course thats easy for me now-but a non computer savy person may struggle..Theres then connection to a NAS how to stream and set that up...-again easy when you know, hard when you dont.. of course travel costs incurred and time for many dont make good economics........So like they say In Dragons Den..."Im Out!"