How has life been after converting my 2,000-CD collection to MP3 files? In the five weeks since I shipped off my discs for good, it has been chaotic — but in a good way. I wrote in today’s paper about my use of iPodMeister – which ripped my discs and sent me the contents on a hard drive, along with two 120GB iPod classics, backup DVDs and $640, in return for the CDs — and the various issues that have arisen in the ensuing five weeks. You can read that column here.

Here are some other things that I wanted to elaborate on or that I didn’t have room to include:

Copyright concerns: As promised in today’s write-up, here is the original column and a followup blog post for those wanting to read past concerns about copyright issues. Since I wrote the latter, in which the RIAA opted not to comment or get involved and a copyright attorney said I was not in legal trouble, I heard from the RIAA again. This time it was from a paralegal in the organization’s legal department who was following up on a phone call from an anonymous reader who “reported” me for copyright violations. After I offered details, he thanked me for clearing it up for him and wished me “a great day.”

iPodMeister’s view: After reading through the volume of reader comments, iPodMeister owner Kris Schrey noted, “80 percent of our customers do not opt for digitizing. They just give us their CDS and get an iPod. Digitizing is usually chosen by people with a large number of older out-of-print titles which are not available in the iTunes store.” That describes me exactly.

Customer service: As I noted in today’s write-up, iPodMeister initially missed one of my discs. Some people have asked me what it was. It was a fourth disc included as a limited-edition bonus in the initial release of the boxed set The Beach Boys: The Pet Sounds Sessions. The disc reproduced the mono mix of the original album and was included in a sleeve apart from the set’s other three discs. Knowing that it might be missed, I hunted for it. When I asked iPodMeister about it, they immediately located the disc, ripped it and express-shipped a disc with the MP3s on it. Abby, who oversaw my project, said the company was holding onto my collection for longer than usual just in case such an instance occurred. I was impressed.

Room to spare: My collection took up less than 300GB on the hard drive that iPodMeister sent, Seagate’s 1.5-terabyte FreeAgent. So I’ll have plenty of room to add more music through downloads from Amazon’s MP3 store and ripped discs that I buy (as noted in today’s column), creating backup DVDs as I go.

Necessary add-ons: As part of the conversion, I’ve made three major tech purchases with the cash from my deal. After buying an iPod-ready car receiver and around-the-house iPod dock for my wife (as detailed in today’s write-up), I used the rest of the money to buy a laptop, a deal from the Dell Outlet for about $450 shipped. I figure that it will give me the most flexibility to manage my digital music collection, since the home desktop PC has to be shared with two teenage daughters who always seem to want to be on at the same time as me. Once it arrives, I’ll dive headlong into the 30,000-plus music tracks I now have to wrangle.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.