Greg In The Desert

I primarily listen to my music collection through my iPod. I don’t care what Apple says, the shuffle feature of the iPod (and to a lesser degree iTunes) does a poor job of preventing the same Artist from playing randomly. Even with the the scheme I came up wit here, my iPod still played 3 songs from Metallica in a row the other day. These methods do a good job of addressing the issues.

I start off with master playlist called “Filtered”, it’s filtered for genres. Second playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played”. This ensures that songs which are rated have actually been played. I ofter will rate new songs high but not really listed to them (I have another playlist for new songs). The next playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played last 14 days.” Finally I’m to my primary playlist, “Filtered – 4 Stars + w/o last 14 days.”

Unfortunately the iPod does not automatically update these playlists, they only get updated when I sync my iPod with iTunes. At one time “The Stroke” had 2x as many plays as any other song, I like that song but not that much, this does a reasonably good job of reducing this effect. I’d prefer to have a playlist that removes, say the top 10% of played songs, but iTunes doesn’t have this option in the filter lists. This also doesn’t prevent the same artist being played in a row.

I suppose for some people it a good value to have someone rip your CD’s for you.

So is all that a good deal? For most people, I don’t think it is. Riptopia, for example, charges $200 to rip a collection of 200 CDs. A collection of 400 discs will run you about $400. Most of the other services I’ve seen charge similar rates. Whether that’s a good value depends on the size of your music collection and how long it takes to rip a CD.

I looked into doing this. I checked with the owner of the service (don’t recall which one) and he basically licensee the name and gets a cut of the profits. I would select the area code that I want to service and he sends all business of that area code my way.

I wanted to know a basic idea how much business I could expect, before I sign up. I don’t think a prospectus is too much to ask. He couldn’t bother to send me that information, I suspect he had no idea. So I never signed up, I didn’t want to get in over my head with too much business and I didn’t have a good idea of how much profit I would make.