WIRED Staff

Gracenote To Offer CD Ripping via Riptopia

Gracenote, the music identification company with controversial origins that helps CD ripping software identify CDs and provides acoustic recognition to Apple among others, announced that it will offer a service to help consumers rip their CD’s using Riptopia’s CD-to-audio-file conversion service. Readers of this blog already know how to rip their own CDs, of course, […]

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Gracenote, the music identification company with controversial origins that helps CD ripping software identify CDs and provides acoustic recognition to Apple among others, announced that it will offer a service to help consumers rip their CD's using Riptopia's CD-to-audio-file conversion service.

Readers of this blog already know how to rip their own CDs, of course, but if you know anyone who received their first MP3 player over the holidays and can't stomach doing all the ripping themselves, this could save them, or possibly you, a lot of tedium.

In addition to claiming that Riptopia's ripping service uses error correction that's superior to what many people use (that sounds a bit dubious), the press release contains shocking data about how empty some peoples' iPods are:

"Studies by both Gartner and the Solutions Research Grouphave concluded that the vast majority of iPods sit mostly empty – with 50
percent of iPods housing fewer than 100 songs, or eight CDs at any giventime. With the average CD collection of those 30 years and oldercontaining between 200 and 300 CDs, the addition of Riptopia’s CD rippingservice to Gracenote’s website allows music fans to easily convert todigital in a matter of days."

The press release mentions that you can access this service through gracenote.com, but I can't find it. I guess if you want to point someone towards the company Gracenote chose to use for it, send them to Riptopia.com for now. The least expensive option delivers 192 Kbps MP3s (150 CDs for $223), but you can recommend the premium service for ripped files in the OGG, FLAC, WMA, AAC, or 320 Kbps MP3 formats.