Thought worth sharing:
   
Sending Your Discs to Cloud Heaven
What to do with the hundreds of CDs collecting dust in your attic? A new
service can rip, store and sell them
 
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By _KEVIN SINTUMUANG_
(http://online.wsj.com/search/term.html?KEYWORDS=KEVIN+SINTUMUANG&bylinesearch=true)

 
 
 
 
 
It was hard. Not painful. But difficult enough that it took a few hours to
wade through the nostalgia (I remember the day I got this Belle & Sebastian
 record!) and bad taste (I own a Dave Matthews album?) living in just one
box of many in my closet. I don't think I'm emotionally prepared for the
crates in my parents' attic. Somewhere up there lurks a Vanilla Ice CD.
 
 
Harry Campbell for The Wall Street Journal


Yes, as my now wife and then girlfriend had been telling me since the iPod
first got a color screen—remember that? How quaint!—it was time get rid of
the CDs.
It's not like we got cheated. Thousands of songs in my pocket instead of
hundreds of jewel cases in an IKEA Benno tower? You'd have to really love
particle-board furniture not to sign up for the digital music revolution. I've
 been a member since the iPod had a scroll wheel that moved—remember that?
How quaint!—and, for the most part, I've been happy. Only people who grew
up in the '70s think liner notes were cool. Maybe it was the, erm, hazy
sense of reality. Does it smell funny in here?
I guess I've been holding on to CDs because I'm still used to the idea of
physically owning the music I listen to rather than simply buying the rights
to hear it. (Read those terms of agreement: You don't really own most of
the songs you purchase online.) And there's also the nerdy future-proofing
rationale: What if I want to reconvert my CDs into a superior,
not-yet-invented digital audio format that my holographic iPhone 16 can beam into my
cerebral cortex?
Then I learned about Murfie (murfie.com), a new business that aims to
relieve any music-owning/future-proofing anxieties that you may have so your
home doesn't look like a special audiophile edition of "Hoarders." Here's what
 it does: For $24 a year, it will rip all of your CDs, converting them into
a variety of iPod and computer-friendly formats including MP3, AAC and
FLAC. There's no limit. It even mails you boxes, tape and preprinted UPS
labels. And unlike a traditional CD-ripping service, the discs don't get
returned unless you really want the clutter again; Murfie lets you sell or trade
your music on its website. Don't want to? For an additional $12 annually
(the first year is free) it will store up to 1,000 discs.
Twenty-four dollars to rip hundreds, even thousands of CDs? It sounds too
good to be true. There are, of course, some catches. You have to download
each CD individually as zip files, and because the actual disc is being
ripped at Murfie's HQ, it can take up to an hour for the transaction to be
prepared. (Grab a coffee, they'll shoot you an email.) And after you do so, you
can't resell or trade the CD for 30 days—Murfie says that this is to
prevent abuse of the service. It's inconvenient if you want thousands of albums
instantly, but a few dozen at a time at your leisure? The process isn't that
big of a deal. It will get better soon: Murfie is working on agreements
with music locker services to allow users to transfer tracks directly to a
cloud account.
Why the CD-ripping fire sale? It's the carrot on the stick. Murfie wants to
 become the Internet's largest used-CD emporium. (It takes a 30% cut.) As a
 used-CD store, they are unique in that buyers don't need to wait for a
disc in the mail—the music can be downloaded. And because these are used-CDs
you're buying, the prices are lower than normal. An example: I found John
Coltrane's "Giant Steps" for $4 ($3 for the CD plus $1 for the rip and
download) on Murfie. It's $8 on iTunes. Sure, if you want the disc, they'll send
it, but why would you? Just have them store it. Or resell it after 30 days
and spread the love.
What Murfie offers is a relatively painless way to wean yourself off of
plastic discs—used-record stores are really picky about what they'll buy—and
get a head start on hopping on the cloud. Over the next few months, I'll
start whittling away my collection one box at a time. And then, finally, I'll
have the room to build a collection of vintage '70s vinyl. I hear they
knew how to do liner notes back then. Does it smell funny in here?


 

 
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