This is very, very cool. Slim Devices, the people who make the open-source SqueezeBox, have announced a CD ripping service. For $129, they'll rip 100 CDs for you and send you back a DVD with all the MP3s or other format of your choice. Lower prices per CD when you ask them to rip more, and 20% surcharge if you want FLAC or some other lossless standard.

What a great idea! I'm still only half-way through ripping my collection, and this would be an excellent way for me to finish the job off, once and for good. Furthermore, I'm intrigued by the FLAC option. I could then transcode to whatever I wanted after the fact. Of course, from Slim Devices' perspective, it's also a good deal for them. You know that many of their customers will send the same CDs, so you're gambling that you don't have to really rip every single CD. However, unlike the failed my.mp3.com, there's (hopefully) no question about licensing issues.

I read their FAQ, and it says that they do not keep copies of the music. They rip each and every CD individually. I imagine this allows them to be legal, but I ain't a lawyer.

If you Google for "mp3 ripping service", there are Google ads for several other firms that offer similar services:

Rip Digital - about $1/CD, but they put a "unique identifying mark" on each track that "does not degrade the sound quality of your music". Uh huh.

MusicRip - also about $1/CD. Nothing about watermarking, one way or the other, but generally less information on the web site.

Moondog Digital - about $0.80/CD, but has an explicit disclaimer that they're not responsible for the quality of the ID3 tags. Weak.

Get Digital - prices range from $2/CD down to $1/CD in bulk, but they have extensive verbiage about the quality of their ID3 tagging, including CD cover art. A nice description from a customer here.

I've been putting this off, but my wife wants the CDs out of the house. Yesterday. So, I'm finally going to rip everything and I'm going to pay one of these services to do the job for me. An interesting question came up, though. Several of these services offer FLAC, Apple Lossless, and/or WMA Lossless. One firm that I didn't find last time, MusicShifter has noticably cheaper prices than their competition and charges the same price for FLAC, even though it means they're sending you a whole lot more DVD-R's.

Another firm that I didn't find last time is ReadyToPlay which, just like GetDigitalInc, seems to place an added emphasis on the quality of their ID3 tags.

I'm pondering using a dual strategy of FLAC or Apple Lossless as an archive format and then down-converting to MP3 for the car, the iPod, and so forth. I've done a bunch of Googling on the topic, and haven't found any that you might describe as a point-and-shoot solution. Part of me wants to really solve this problem. The other part of me thinks that high bit-rate MP3s are good enough and then I can call it a day.

I'm not a programmer so I don't even know what a batch program is... but this is what I've used to transcode from FLAC to MP3:

Easy CD-DA Extractor

It's a pay program, but it will do batch conversion to - from just about anything and transfer tags as well.

I'm currently re-ripping both mine and SWMBO's CD collection, my CD's will go in the loft but she refuses to let go of her CDs because she uses them in the car (I did offer my spare empeg but she didn't want to lug it around and she didn't want to fork out for a Dension).

EDIT: I'm encoding them with album/track replay gain, and using the sector align option too.

I'm going to keep them as FLACs and transcode to MP3 for the empeg and ipod, the plan is also to either get a squeezebox, soundbridge or build my own network player. Thinking of something with a slot loading dvd-rw and a 7 inch touchscreen. I'd eventually like to rip my DVDs and do the same with them.

Should also point out that v3's gapless FLAC playback is brilliant, the only problem is that even on a 32MB player the drives spin up at least once a track.

Okay, here's a higher degree of difficulty thought. I've got about 1200 CDs already ripped and 600 to go. I'm going to ship those 600 off first, but after that I've got the remaining CDs, many of which were ripped at low bitrates back when I didn't know any better.

For many of those CDs, I went above and beyond the call of duty in annotating the ID3 tags, including putting in BPMs and whatnot. Everything is stored and managed by iTunes. Let's say I send off these CDs to a ripping service, getting back a giant pile of Apple Lossless tunes. Is there any way I might be able to move my metadata over in a semi-automated fashion?

iTunes library is a nice XML file, there exist ID3 libraries and command-line tools, so cobbling something together yourself should not be such a problem...

Doing a few google serches I see that iTunes can export to txt or html. I'm not sure how or what it will export.

What software did you originally rip the CD's in?

EAC has an option to export to local freedb, cdplayer.ini or db text file.

Tag & Rename has export options to CVS, XML, HTML, tab delimited.

I would check to see if any of these services support getting your current tags from you and using them when they rip the CD's.

My tunes have been ripped, over the years, with a variety of tools, ranging from grip (on linux) through AudioGrabber and EAC (Windows) and most recently iTunes (Mac). I've definitely butted heads with iTunes' XML file, when I wanted to copy part of my library from my Mac to a laptop for DJing.

Here's where things get tricky. I ship off a stack of CDs to get ripped. Most are new to the MP3 collection. Some are repeats. However, there will be subtle variations in the tagging, with causes ranging from typos and capitalization variation through additional metadata that I might have added and also including variations among the different ripping tools I've used over the years. As a result, there's no easy, sure-fire way to line up old and new data as necessarily having the same source.

I suppose I could hack together some sort of tool that tosses all of the words together (i.e., word vectors, which count how many times a word occurs anywhere in the tags) and takes dot products of the word vectors. That's a cheesy but possibly effective similarity metric that might help me cluster things, and then I'd have to work out something to apply the metadata both from ID3 and from the iTunes XML. This is starting to sound like more than a weekend hack to get it right, so I was (perhaps vainly) hoping somebody else had already hacked together something along these lines.

The possibility of sending them tag info from what I've already ripped is intriguing, but presumable these people are all about high volume and their trained monkeys don't know how to do something custom along these lines. I'm probably better off doing it myself, but the problem is figuring out how to do it properly.