A professional service that quickly and easily converts your CD collection into digital music files Suitable for any digital music player (MP3, FLAC etc.)
Allowing you to realise the full potential of your Digital Music System (Linn, Moon, Auralic, Sonos, Naim etc) without any of the hassle of setting up your own conversion system.
This is the Primary format, priced per disc.
If you would like the files in further formats, order here first, then add the same quantity by clicking on this product.
We can convert Audio CDs into one or many of the following formats – you can choose on ordering:
Lossless
FLAC, Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, Monkey Audio (APE), WAV*
Lossy
MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg Vorbis
*We do not recommend WAV due to lack of metadata storage.
Digital Delivery
A choice of storage is available for the delivery of the data to yourself.
Generally we provide the data on USB Memory stick, you can get as many as 250 CDs onto a 32GB Memory stick, or 1,000 on a 128GB Stick. Other options are available, such as hard disks.
Physical Delivery
After converting your CDs, we will return your new digital library on USB or hard drive, along with your original CDs. Our turn around time is usually around 1 week from receipt, although this often depends on the quantity.
CD Artwork and Metadata tagging
Each track will include CD Artwork (where possible), with id3 tagging of Artist, Song title, Album Title, Album Artist, Genre and Year so you can quickly search and find your favourite tunes, and build custom playlists.
Each CD and track are individually tagged using licensed MetaData providers for high accuracy of tagging and album art.
High Quality Conversion
We use industry leading CD drives for our conversion on custom built CD Archiving rigs to ensure the highest quality conversion. We usually use Plextor or Sony drives. This ensures we capture as much of the data as we possibly can. If a particularly scratched or damaged CD is found, we can often recover music that normal CD ripping services cannot.
No Watermarking
For your convenience we will not put any digital watermarking or DRM protection on your files.
This entirely depends on your usage requirements, and the quality of your listening equipment. Generally if you want to listen to the music on a standard car stereo, or whilst out jogging for example, then MP3 is usually sufficient. We always encode these files at 320kbps, unless you request us to do them at a lower resolution. This is the maximum quality for standard MP3.
For the best quality however, and for archival purposes we recommend encoding to FLAC files – these are ideal for most home use, including network streamers such as those manufactured by NAIM, Linn, Moon etc.
However, you do not have to choose one or another exclusively, we can convert your CDs into many different file formats, simultaneously, and we can supply multiple formats at a nominal extra cost.
Lossless Compression takes your data stream from the CD and compresses it by approximately 40-50%, this will give an identical experience to if you played it from your CD player directly
Types of Lossless files include:
FLAC
Apple Lossless (ALAC)
WMA Lossless
Monkey Audio (APE)
WAV *
At 1pCD we tend to recommend FLAC as being the most compatible and best file format for music storage. It is very flexible and compression rates are excellent.
WAV files suffer from poor compression, and are unable to store metadata, such as track title, artist names etc.
Lossy music files utilise more comprehensive compression techniques to Lossless file formats, but there are compromises in musical quality. This is particularly noticeable on high-end home music systems. Generally Lossy files are around 10% of the size of the original source, meaning a typical 74 minute CD would take around 74GB of file space.
Typical file formats include:
MP3
AAC
WMA
Ogg Vorbis
Generally these files are ideal for listening to in car stereos, and on personal music players (walkmans) etc. where there is a lot of ambient noise for the music to contend with.
Metadata is the “extras” that come in a music file, and can include a whole host of information about the music contained, including –
CD Cover Art
Artist
Track Title
Album Title
Album Artist
Track Number
Lyrics
Year of Release
Genre
Please note though that not all of this information will be available for all discs, and that errors can occur, as this metadata can be incorrectly supplied by the music companies, or we may find a disc with multiple, contradictory or just plain inaccurate data.
Classical music is particularly difficult to classify as there are so many different schools of thought on how best to categorise these.
Similarly Home-Made CDrs (Mix-tapes) are virtually impossible.
Each disc we convert will be saved to a folder structure of Artist\Album\Track 01, 02 etc this is the only structure we offer for a simple, speedy service.
Whilst we try our best with home-made CD-rs there are often issues getting them to extract properly, from our experience it’s roughly 50-50 as to whether they are successfully ripped, and the chances definitely reduce with age.
Unfortunately we still have to charge for these, even if we are unsuccessful as they often take longer to extract than a factory produced CD.
Once you have placed an order, we will contact you with the details of where to send your discs.
We strongly recommend sending them by an insured method, for smaller quantities you could use Royal Mail Special Delivery, but this can be expensive due to the weight of CDs. Using a courier service such as Parcel Force or UPS will be cheaper, particularly on orders over 100 discs.
For larger quantities, we also recommend sending just the discs unboxed from their Jewel Cases and placed onto spindles or “cakeboxes” – these are available quite cheaply from Amazon, or we can supply these on request.
Returning the discs to you
After converting your CDs we will return your digital library on USB memory stick, together with your original CDs.
Typically our turn around time is 1-2 weeks after receipt of your discs, although this does depend heavily on the quantity. We will always do our best to let you know how we are getting on.
