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 * 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? Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved