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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Even if I had a bunch of CD players around, the idea of swapping between 172 discs doesn't sound great.

There are CD ripping services around. In the UK they charge around ~60p/CD (gets cheaper at ~500 CDs). Some will rip lossless, which is what I was after for the 800 or so CDs I stupidly ripped at 192Kbps over the years.

I've found myself in a similar position. I even ripped some CDs at 128kbps, back in the day when my computer had a 4GB HDD. I really need to go back and redo them all, but the amount of effort required is really demotivating. How do such services work? You take all your CDs to them? I imagine postage costs would be astronomical otherwise!

Most will collect. Some will let you drop your collection off. Some[1] will ask you to load your CDs into their spindles. I think all of them want your CDs out of their jewel cases. Note that I've only looked at services in or around London.

[1] http://www.russandrews.com/product-CD-Ripping-Service-4300.h...

Since you only have to change the CD once about every hour, its not as bad as it might seem. ;)

Yes, if you're talking about using Exact Audio Copy to rip to FLAC once.

Otherwise you'll still be left with a whole bunch of fragile and physical plastic discs that can only be played on specific ancient devices...

I wouldn't feel any moral qualms about downloading the torrent (still huge) if I had the box of discs on my desk. The swapping of discs isn't as bad as the tagging. Is the set tagged on Musicbrainz?

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