PhilMur's thoughts on biz/tech/money/life

I recently looked up several different companies which allow you to mail your physical compact discs to them, and then in turn deliver the music back to you in digital form.  After my wife’s hard drive crashed yet again a few months ago, erasing her digital audio collection which she manually converted on her computer, CD by CD.  And so I knew we had to come up with a quicker way to convert all that music, this time, instead of manually ripping each CD ourselves.  Sure, various utilities out there make the copying faster, but you still have to deal with swapping hundreds of CDs (in our case) in and out of your computer as they are copied.  Additionally, we had never converted all of my CD’s, instead opting to convert a CD here or there as I wanted.

I looked at three services in detail. Each of these services consistently showed up at the top of search results for me when I searched Google using a number of phrases such as “cd to mp3 conversion” and “cd to digital audio conversion”.

Musicshifter.com boasted “as low as 69 cents per cd”, but after visiting their site one learns that the 69 cents price only applies to archive, “lossless” quality cd backups.  As helpful as that service is, most people will want their cd’s converted into formats that result in file sizes small enough to load onto portable music devices, such as the Apple/iTunes proprietary AAC format, or the popular MP3 format.  To get that type of STANDARD conversion done, their pricing starts at 99 cents per CD and goes up from there, depending on how quickly you want the digital files back in your hands.

RipDigital.com, another top site in Google search results, also prices their standard service at 99 cents per CD.  A big negative, however, is that their 99 cent service only provides you with 192 bit audio quality, and in order to get your converted digital audio files created at a higher bit rate, you will have to pay a total of $1.19 per CD.  Sadly, their “lossless” quality backup service is very pricey at $1.39 a CD.  This makes it fairly expensive to order a standard digital version AND a lossless, archive version of each CD for those that might wish to do that.

PickledProductions.com was the third site that I closely evaluated.  Their product offering is excellent.  Although all of the services make it easy to ship your CDs to them with containers they send you, and although all of them offer insurance for the CDs you ship to them, Pickled Productions actually does all of this at the lowest price of all of them — only a 89 cents per CD conversion price, and for that price you can get the songs recorded digitally at a quality level as high as bit rate of 320!  Additionally, you can have them also create a second digital copy of each CD with a second format for only 15 to 25 cents, depending on the format.  This is perfect for those wanting to also secure a digital “lossless format” copy of each CD without spending twice the conversion cost as the other sites would appear to require.

So, we are moving forward with using the PickledProductions.com service as its service appears as good as the others, and its pricing clearly the lowest!  (10 to 20 cents per CD savings adds up when you have several hundred CDs).

I will let you know how it turns out!

NOTE:  I have found a great online converter app that shows you how many CD’s you can convert, given a certain amount of hard drive space.  Click here for the link.

UPDATE, 1/5/2010: Today I placed an order on the PickledProductions.com website after briefly speaking with a sales rep on the phone.  I also found out they are offering 10% off orders right now with the promo code NEW YEAR.

UPDATE, 3/4/2010: After receiving the Pickled Productions “welcome packet” about a week after my phone order, I put off organizing my cd collection for a few weeks, then finally decided to get things in order and place them on the spindles that Pickled Productions sent to me.  Before sending them back, I called them and asked if I could add a second format (for only 15 cents more per cd) on my collection conversion, and they said “of course!”.  After mailing them in, it took about 3-4 weeks before receiving a confirmation e-mail that the conversion was done; within a week of receiving that email the whole package– my cd’s along with the data dvd’s filled with the music, returned.  I was happy to find the data dvd’s excellently organized, labeled with the artist name range on the label of each dvd, and on the dvd itself I found separate folders for each artist, and within them subfolders for each album.  The song files themselves were named by the name of the song, with the artist in parentheses at the end of the song name.  A very clean, organized, format to be sure.  To top it all off, I received a printed, bound, printed music catalog detailing my collection, complete with color-printed cd covers along with track lists beside each one.  Because I sent in my collection in alphabetical order, I am not sure whether the music data dvd’s and the printed music catalog also came alphabetical because of how I had organized them, or if Pickled Productions would have re-sorted them alphabetically anyhow.  All in all, I was VERY pleased with the service and the price!