CD Ripping
by havoc
Amy and I broke down and sent our CD collection to Get Digital. I had manually
ripped about half of it a long time ago, but the metadata (from
MusicBrainz in 2005 or so, I guess) was a disaster, and I didn’t have
a good system in place so never finished ripping the rest.
Get Digital was far from free, but they did a nice job with fast
turnaround. They managed to get the right information for every one of
our CDs, including some imports, CDs that came with magazines, small
local artists, and other challenges. They did not have album art for
some of the more obscure things. Their metadata is completely
consistent; they always spell the same artist in the same way. They do
“Various Artists” correctly, so the artist for the album is “Various
Artists” but the artist for each track is the actual performer of that
track. They’re consistent about always using “Various Artists” too, so
we don’t have some albums under other spellings like “Various” or
“Multiple Artists” or whatever.
Anyway, I recommend Get Digital overall. I plan to use them again
after building up a batch of 50 new CDs. (They have a minimum of 50.)
From now on I’m just going to assume all CDs cost an extra couple
bucks to get the ripping done, since we won’t listen to them enough
otherwise.
The bonus – we had to stack all our CDs on spindles to mail them in,
in the process we pulled all the paper inserts out of the jewel cases
and put those in another box. So now we have two small boxes – one of
paper inserts, one of CD spindles – instead of several huge, heavy
boxes of jewel cases. The spindles can go in the basement as
backups. The empty jewel cases will finally be out of the house.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2008-03.html#29)