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Get Ripped Without The Drudgery -- It Actually Works


Posted by David DeJean, Mar 8, 2007 10:01 AM

No, this isn't about pecs and abs. You're a geek. Even if you had pecs and abs, chicks wouldn't take a second look at you. But if you had Riptopia, chicks might take a second look at your music collection.

Let's say you're an average guy. That means you've got somewhere between 200 and 2,000 CDs sitting around, and you've got a digital music player, probably an iPod. You don't download much music from iTunes (nobody does, it turns out: Steve Jobs says your iPod is nearly full and you bought only 22, or 3 percent, of those thousand or so tracks from Apple). You occasionally buy some new music and rip it into iTunes or MP3 files or something. But when are you going to get around to ripping those hundreds or thousands of CDs?

I have found a Web site that can help us. (Yeah, I admit it, I do OK with chicks, but I'm terrible when it comes to music.) Riptopia is an outfit that will take your CDs, rip them to good-quality MP3s, and send you back your disks and a DVD with the music files on it. And I can testify that the experience is mostly entirely pleasant.

You go to the Riptopia site and buy their service -- they've been charging about $1.49 a CD, but next Monday, Mar. 12, they're dropping their price to 99 cents a disk, which means they'll do 50 CDs for about $50 (on a credit card -- no PayPal, unfortunately), or any number more than 50. They ship you enough CD spindles and cartons to hold your order. You pull the disks out of their jewel cases, stack them on the spindle, and send the box back to Riptopia. In a reasonable period of time you get back your disks and one or more DVDs of MP3 files.

The hardest part of this is actually getting around to picking the CDs you want to get ripped. The box sat around my house for almost a month before I finally gritted my teeth and began turning jewel cases out of their unlikely hiding places.

Once I shipped the spindle of disks off to Riptopia, it took a couple of weeks, give or take a day or two, for them to rip and return. I know all this because I have an audit trail in my email: Riptopia was very good about notifying me when they had shipped me the packaging, when they received my disks, and when they shipped them back.*

The files were all properly named and tagged with title and artist information and so forth. The DVD came with a very clear sheet of instructions on how to get all those files into iTunes, too. (Am I alone, or is iTunes a little bit opaque?)

The standard Riptopia service gives you 192Kbps MP3 files on DVDs. For another 50 cents a disk you can get the premium conversion service, and get back files in your choice of MP3 320Kbps, WMA Lossless, or FLAC, with Gracenote metadataand and Muze album art (same as the Apple Music Store). Riptopia will also sell you an external hard drive and ship it with your files installed. Or you can get a 4GB iPod Nano with 50 of your CDs ripped and installed. The company sells the full range of Apple media products.

Note to Riptopia: I liked the service. But I've got a problem. Couldn't I ship you three or four boxes of old vinyl and get those LPs converted to MP3s? Please? I'd pay. Some of this stuff isn't even out on CD. What am I supposed to do with it? Please help!

------------------------

*Disclaimer: The Truth-in-Fearless-Computer-Journalism Act requires me to state that I may have gotten extra-good service from Riptopia because the company knew I am a writer-reviewer -- I occasionally get hit on by PR chicks even though I, like you, am pecs-and-abs-challenged. I first ran into the company at CES in Las Vegas in January. But I suspect the emails are pretty much standard operating procedure. Hey, on the Web, everybody with a credit card is buff and beautiful.

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