Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.

Get Ripped, Clear Clutter and Boogie Down

Many of us still lug around our CD collections despite the fact we stream our music or listen to MP3’s. We can’t bear to rid ourselves of these little mirrored disks that store music, memories and money. So we burrow them in the recesses of our closets or proudly display the jewelboxes in our living rooms–vestiges of days when visitors could size you up based on your Kraftwerk collection.

Though media storage is a valid form of decoration, the fact is most of us can carry our music library in our pockets nowadays. And while many of us have intentions galore for converting our CD collections into digital formats, the gap between intention and action is often a vast one.

Enter RipDigital. The service takes your old CD’s and converts them into one of three digital compression formats: 192kbps, 320kbps or Apple Lossless (ALAC) and FLAC formatting–basically good, great and audiophile qualities. Prices are $.99, $1.29 and $1.49 per disk respectively.

Send your CD’s to RipDigital and they will send the files back on a DVD or your device like an iPod or external harddrive. They also sell hardrives ($134-274) and iPods ($269-439).

If the prices sound high, consider that an iTunes song runs you around $.99. For a couple hundred bucks, you could convert a pretty sizable collection, adding tons of music you already like to your library as well as saving space and clearing clutter.

We realize that digitally compressed music, for some very discerning ears, doesn’t quite have the richness of CD’s (or vinyl, some would say). For these people–e.g. Gary Chang whose tiny house includes a wall of CD’s–keeping their CD’s and vinyl makes sense. The rest of us, who don’t do anything with our CD collections, we must concede that music that is not listened to has really low fidelity.

image via flickr/misterjt