Now you can rip your whole CD collection and do it for a song

Music was first delivered on vinyl records, then on magnetic tape in one form or another, such as 8-tracks and cassettes.

Optical media, better known as CDs, came later, and many wondered what would be next. It seems the media of the future is no media at all. More and more music is being delivered over the Internet.

Apple's iTunes is the 800-pound gorilla in the online music-delivery industry along with a handful of smaller competitors trying to get in on all the action. And there's a lot of that action going on out there.

The music gets to us electronically and we store those electronic bits on our computers. From there, we can feed them into our MP3 players such as an iPod. We can even burn those electronic files to a CD and play them in our cars.

Storage devices

But even cars and home-stereo systems are becoming digital storage devices that can hold, manipulate and play MP3 files. It's looking like the best way to buy, store and play music is on an MP3 player.

But what about all of the music CDs you already own?

Your computer has the ability to rip the songs off a CD, convert them to MP3 files and store them to be played.

Until Primera Technology's PTRip software (www.primera.com), the only way to rip a CD was to do them one at a time on your computer or send them to a ripping service.

With PTRip, you can take CDs and place them into one of Primera's Bravo disc duplicators, which will automatically read a CD's content, convert the songs to MP3 files and store them into the iTunes or Windows Media Player.

The only problem was that if you didn't already own a Bravo, you had to pony up the bucks to purchase one.

But now that Primera has introduced its new Bravo Rental Program, you can rip your whole CD collection and do it for a song.

Primera has set up the one week Bravo SE Rental Program for Personal CD Ripping. For $299 you get a specially designed, ripping-only (the printing function is disabled) Bravo SE unit that holds up to 20 CDs at a time. The fee includes the duplicator, RTRip software and quick start instructions. The price also includes round-trip shipping.

Easy process

Just stack your CDs into the Bravo and select the Import to Media Player or Import to iTunes option depending on which media player you use to play your music.

The little robotic arm will pick up a CD, place it in the reader, convert it to an MP3 file and put it in the output bin when it's done ripping the music and placing the files on your computer.

The process will repeat itself until all of your CDs are processed. Just reload the bin with more of your CDs to continue.

The whole process requires you to have an Internet connection, as the PTRip application uses the CDDB, an international database of published CDs to identify the CDs that are being ripped.

That information is used to label each MP3 file with the song's title, author and other information such as its genre and the length of its playing time.

While PTRip works only with Windows XP and Vista, the ripped MP3 files it creates can then be copied to a Macintosh and played on iTunes.

While Primera's PTRip software is a great idea, only Bravo owners could use it. But with their new rental program, it now makes their ripping solution available to anyone and makes this one of the most affordable ways to convert and bring your aging CD collection into the 21st century.

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— Deborah Porterfield —Gannett News Service