I'm sure this topic has been covered before, but my Search-Fu is weak.

So, who on the forum has used such a service, which did you use, would you recommend it, what advice would you offer?

I'm sure a few folks will have loads of 'useful' advice about how I can use EAC and LAME/FLAC and some scripting to rip all 1200+ of my CDs. Or perhaps you'll recommend a less legal option. I'm well aware of those options, but as a married father of 1.5 (#2 is still cooking) I have exactly 0 spare time to rip these all myself. And, since I'm gainfully employed it is hard to justify being Mr Torrent man.

Thanks!

JT

Hey, welcome back. And congratulations. I hear you on the zero free time. I still owe people my Axiom mix CD and the Axiomfest photo CDs. I haven't forgotten, folks!

Now, back to your regularly scheduled thread. Hopefully you will get some good advice. I'll try to flag someone down for you.

Well unless you own a 400 cd changer you'll have no choice but to manually rip each CD. Pop one in, rip it into FLAC and pop it out and in with the next. Each CD should take about 5min or so. I say approx 100hrs to rip all your cd's lol.

I believe Foobar will rip and convert to FLAC. I rip all my music to lossless WMA or FLAC. Each song can be around 20-40MB in size depending on length. So you'll need plenty of space, approx 360GB if have my calculations right.

You can also use Foobar to play your music or WMP. WMP will need a flac plugin though. Easy enough to find though.

I've never heard of such a service, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were illegal (in the US).

I know you didn't want this advise, but I just ripped about 300 CDs to FLAC, and it took me a couple of days, while I was doing other things. In fact, I'd think with some young kids around it would be an ideal time to do this. I remember doing mundane tasks like this when the infants couldn't go to sleep and such.

Plan-B: How old is kid 1.0? I paid my 4 year old $.05 a CD to rip a stack of CDs. (That was with iTunes. You just had to place the CD in the tray and put in back in the case when the ripping was complete. iTunes automatically ripped and ejected.)

$0.05 a CD!, that's even cheaper than China! if your 4 year old needs extra cash, let me know, I have a few CDs that need to be ripped

I'd prefer mine not to be smeared in jelly fingerprints.

I don't think there is a legit service that you could actually send physical CDs to. I can only tell you what I did when I went through the same and you already looked into it.

I used EAC with a script that ripped it once to FLAC then automatically ripped it a second time to MP3 for my portable players. Take the time to set up the filenames and tags the way you want them before you start the endeavor and you won't have to mess with that later.

The script with EAC is a bit complex to set up but it works flawlessly once it's done. A simpler method would be to convert everything to FLAC and then use a program where you you can convert all the FLAC files to MP3 or whatever in large batches afterwards. Foobar has been mentioned and would do the trick nicely.

I just picked at it, doing a few every evening as I was sitting in front of the computer for other reasons anyways. PCs are more than fast enough nowadays that you can be ripping a CD and doing other work without causing errors. Earlier on, you had to be careful.

I put 3 DVD drives in my pc and set up iTunes to eject as soon as it was done ripping. Then I just went through the discs. Unfortunately, I couldn't jimmy it (often) to rip all 3 at once for some godforsaken reason. Still finished >300 discs in less than a week, ripping to ALAC.

Do some research on dbpoweramp and their "pro" products.
http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

From now on, Ken's new wrestling name will be.....

The Red Ripper!!

There WERE a few different companies that offered this ripping service years ago. I remember seeing their ads and thinking I wouldn't want to part with my 1000 or so CDs to put the job in the hands of others. Really, it would only make sense that they need to verify that you own the disc for legal reasons, but there would be no reason to not just have most of this stuff on their hard drives. Really, how many times over and over would they rip "Thriller" or "Dark Side of the Moon" before they'd just say copy it off Drive R" or something?

I haven't seen them advertised in awhile, though.

Yeah, I remember seeing services like that mentioned, but not lately.

I could see them copying off of their own hard drives to save time, but you'd hope they'd at least be aware of different masterings if they resorted to that.

You'd hope, but it's probably not likely.

Thanks guys.

There are still a number of services that will do this. It's totally legal, though I don't know what hoops they must jump through to keep the RIAA off their backs. Unlike DVDs, CDs have no encryption so you're not breaking the law when making an archive copy of something you paid for. So, as long as you keep the CDs the MP3s/FLAC/whatever files are perfectly legal.

If I choose a service and go with this I'll post my experience.

-jt