January 10, 2006
Thanks!
It seems as though I am nearly the last person in America to get a portable digital music player, but it's been worth the wait! Mom and dad, thanks for the incredible gift! I've spent some time over the last few weeks ripping music from a few hundred CDs. I'm poised to get all the music off the hundreds of cassette tapes, too, as soon as I have some time to devote to sawpping cassettes and trimming tracks in Adobe Audition. I'm looking forward to having my whole music library accessible from the big red computer currently known as Clifford.
Since the CDs were ripped as MP3s, I can play them on pretty much any music player, but iTunes is the only way I know of to get the music onto the iPod. Amazingly, it only took about 45 minutes to transfer the 2700 songs I wanted to the iPod. And to think that the iPod can store more than three times that number (it's a 30GB iPod) is simply amazing.
After receiving the iPod, I decided to look around for CD ripping services. It's not that I couldn't rip my own, but I was simply curious about how many businesses were offering a "send them in, we'll rip them to MP3 and write them to a hard drive or DVD for you" type service. There are several and many of them seem to be alike in cost and available services.
One of the local companies here in the Twin Cities is RipShark. After a bit of digging, I found that the company was started by a gentleman with whom I used to work. The reviews on his site are good and it appears he has started yet another successful company. The market for ripping CDs to MP3 format will certainly blossom as more and more high-volume digital music players find their way to the market. I believe that as the cell phone continues to converge with the PDA and other digital devices like the music player, remote control, and RFID for consumer transactions, RipShark will continue to do well.
As for me, I've got to get started on converting all those years of cassette mixes from analog to digital and cleaning them up for preservation. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to listen to music I enjoyed years ago, and looking forward even more to converting the music purchased by my family to a format we'll all be able to enjoy.
I'm also excited that my car stereo has an auxiliary sound input which allows me to connect the iPod directly to the car stereo. No more fumbling with CDs! Oh, if only I'd had an iPod for all those 1300 mile trips to and from the east coast!
Posted by MEK at January 10, 2006 12:53 AM