Making Money on Stuff I already paid for once

I recently noticed a service offered through Circuit City that’s called "Get Digital". When you sign up, they send a CD spindle and shipping container to you, they take your CDs, organize, tag, and "burn" them onto DVD (s), then load them onto your player as MP3 files. They return your player, original CDs, and DVD MP3 archive back to you. Costs are 1.39 per CD (that’s about 0.10 per track) for less than 200 CDs and seem to have it all covered. If you are interested you can look them up at www.getdigitalinc.com or from the Circuit City web pages. Sounds like what you would like someone else to do for you. They include the album cover art in the tag, so it’s a great way to organize your CD collection. The 192 KBPS bit rate is popular, but practically all of mine are ripped at the CD-quality 128 KBPS. You’d have your music loaded (or loadable) on your player, and you can just take it with you in the car or plug it in to your entertainment center and listen to them all properly cataloged and organized.

The newer DVD players play the DVDs with MP3, but on the PC, you can just copy it over to your hard drive and the free windows media software would see the tags and automatically build your music library for you. iTunes and Musicmatch also build your library for free, and all three programs recognize the mp3 files as native without need to convert. So whatever player or service option you choose, they all use these tags and file formats. Napster, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc. only automatically tag the music that you download, and then do not let you keep your "downloaded" music if you stop paying for the monthly service unless you had burned them to a standard audio CD. Your license expires and the digital rights management built into their software locks you out. Both Windows Media (MSN Music) and Musicmatch want you to pay $20 per year to use their tagging feature now (it used to be free) to tag the tracks in your library.

On a personal note, I have many hours invested in organizing my digital music collection, it would be worth the price just to have someone else do it right the first time. If I had to do it all over again, that type of service would be the way to go. I’m up to nearly 8000 tracks on a 60GB color iPod. I had BestBuy install a iPod adapter that makes my iPod work directly through my car stereo like a CD changer ($200). The only music service that provides mp3 files directly as a download is e-music. I signed up with them for a trial period and got 50 free tracks as mp3 file downloads for the first month. When I wanted to bail out, they offered me three months "lite" service for 20 downloads a month at 5.95 a month to change my mind- if you want to compare an online service as an option that would be the only one I’d even try and recommend.