I was asked a question last night and suddenly had a shock to remember this CD ripping business is still operating. Some years ago somebody suggested iTunes and iTunes Music Sore would be transformed into a cloud based service. Rather than ripping CDs and storing them locally, then adding to that music archive with purchased tracks, all our music would be moved away to a gigantic data centre in America.

What then would be the point of having a CD ripping business, focusing on care and service, wouldn't Apple be doing that all for us?

I'm pleased to say iTunes Match - the cloud based option - is now with us, and podServe is still here, ripping more CDs than ever. Why? Well, even if you adopt iTunes Match, you still have to have a ripped track to start with, you can't just say you've got this and that CD which then appears in your library. You aren't given Spotify type access to their back catalogue and yes you have to pay for it.

iTunes match in the UK costs about half the price of a big USB drive per year. As an off-site backup option it isn't greatly compelling (it doesn't handle photos for example). Plus if you have high quality music (Apple Lossless or AIFF) you'll experience a drop in quality. I have mixed feelings, but I'm unequivocally glad we're still here, ripping CDs, untouched and unmatched.

Just to update an earlier post, software to synch music between your computer and iTunes.

While I still like Doubletwist Lifehacker is now recommending iSyncr (available here). They now favour this over Doubletwist as you only need to install this on your Android phone; Doubletwist needs an iTunes lookalike program installed on your PC or Mac.

Like Doubletwist there's both a wired and wifi version available.

Clients often ask for help, typically how do they get the DVDs containing their music from our DVDs through their PC and onto their iPod. So it's interesting to be asked how to get music onto an Android mobile phone.

The process up to loading the phone is the same as for an iPod, we import the DVDs into iTunes. As iTunes can't recognise anything that wasn't made by Apple we recommend an additional item of software, Doubletwist, which replicates iTunes, then manages the flow of music from your hard drive onto the phone. So I loaded the music into iTunes and as we were chugging through the final DVD the client picked up her phone. Amazing, the music was there already.

Synch was happening, not via iTunes / Doubletwist but via her subscription to Spotify. Virtually instantly Spotify was finding the music tracks and making them available to her subscription account. Brilliant, we decided it wasn't necessary to continue with Doubletwist.

Macrumors.com is saying iTunes Match is now available for users in the UK.

One of our first CD ripping clients has become a regular client, I think I know my way around his house as well as my own. On Wednesday I was up and down stairs (yet again) re-installing Sonos software so his music system would work again.

In the train on the way back I was thinking in a brick & concrete London home, where wireless signals travel badly, Sonos is just too complicated for the average user. When it fails it takes ages to get it up and running again. So I was interested to read in The Times today their “Interiors Special” - 10 trends that hit in 2011, this came in at number 4 “The trickle down trend : iPad homes”.

“Not long ago a complex array of control gadgetry was de rigueur in expensive homes, but today anyone can control their music, TV, lighting and heating with an iPhone or an iPad.” A pundit then goes on to comment on the super-rich “The prime market has seen the importance of frivolous centralised electrics wither in favour of simple old-fashioned light switches”. gets my vote. Pay attention Sonos, you’re beginning to look frivolous.

When clients ask for their ripped CDs to be returned to them on a USB hard drive I normally buy one in Brentwood High Street. For years I shopped in our branch of Dixons but they closed earlier this year so now I rely on Argos.

Argos has been patchy for technology supplies but they do have the advantage of being competitively priced. I’ve just walked in and picked a drive, but not yesterday - they had no disc drives at all. Not a single drive. When I got back I tried to order one from the Argos website but that wasn’t possible, none available for order either for collection in store or home delivery.

This afternoon I had to drive into London to collect CDs so I stopped off in PC World on the way back. Talking to one of their staff about the reduced stock of drives they had and he explained the problem. Apparently 90+% of the worlds supply of drives are made in a relatively small area of Thailand, and they’ve been hit hard by floods recently. He pointed to a sign rationing drives to two per customer until supplies are back to normal.

So, if you want your music files returned on a USB drive we might struggle at least until Thailand has dried out. Wonder if the BBC has a weather forecast for the Far East.

If you’ve seen our CD ripping blog you’ll know we had a panic when the installer of the Sonos system for which we’d ripped several hundred CDs, had pointed to a post on the Sonos website to say AIFF files were not supported.

Here’s a footnote. I was contacted by our client on Monday. He explained that he’d been listening to his music over the weekend and thankfully it was streaming fine. He’s happy, I’m relieved. So we’ll continue to rip CDs for Sonos users, into AIFF, Apple Lossless or into AAC or MP3 formats. With confidence.

We don't always get it right, when we get it wrong the best thing is to hold up your hand and apologise. Then fix it. Which I'll have to do today.We've been ripping CDs for nearly eight years, initially exclusively for iPod / iTunes configurations and more recently for Sonos. That part of our business has grown rapidly so today we have ripped CDs for many clients who don't even own an iPod. These music lovers have invested significant sums in their music so naturally they don't baulk at buying a large capacity NAS drive to store their music. Storage capacity isn't an issue in these cases, clients want the highest quality sound.CD ripping for Sonos took us into new territory, that of uncompressed music. The best quality digital music is AIFF. It has the benefit of being entirely uncompressed, it's exactly as appears on the original CD plus the features of a digital "wrapper" that holds the album, artist, track data etc. Before I leapt into this with Sonos clients I made some checks.First, I looked on the Sonos website where it clearly said they support AIFF files. Indeed I looked again earlier today and on the opening sales page for their music player's features it lists AIFF as one of the supported file formats.Second, I rang Sonos and asked them. I got confirmation of what's on the website. So I went ahead with confidence and ripped a batch of CDs for our first client. When we delivered the NAS drive with its files (I think the first one was over 700 CDs) I connected the drive, pointed the Sonos software at it, and updated the library. My client flipped through his controller, hit play, and we listened as Verdi filled the house.Since then I've lost track of the number of Sonos / AIFF configurations we've worked with, all without issue, until yesterday. We ripped just over 650 CDs for a client but the signal drops out. Some tracks play fine, then another drops out. Frustrating and not what anyone wants. My client went back to the installer and he's replied quoting one of the Sonos FAQs - this says that while AIFF is "supported" it is not "recommended". There's a footnote at the bottom of that page which says -Sonos does not recommend choosing AIFF files for your library because of AIFF's outdated metadata support. You can acheive the same audio quality by using FLAC or Apple Lossless, both of which fully support metadata and album art.The installer is interpreting this as if "not recommended" means the same as "unsupported", and is refusing to help our client any further. Where does this leave us?For my client it means I'll have to say sorry, admit that I'd not seen this example of weasel words, and possibly challenge the installers interpretation of the footnote. I will gladly offer to convert his music into Apple Lossless. Enough of my problems.What does this mean?Staggeringly it means Sonos no longer supports the highest quality audio. Nobody who's really into music is going to accept anything less than the best. Sure, Apple Lossless is very good, but it's not the best.If you want music streamed at its best (uncompressed) Sonos has ceded the ground to other suppliers - Apple will stream AIFF all day long, as will better systems such as Crestron. Future home entertainment demands aren't going to be for more compressed formats so unless Sonos can address this they're going to struggle.What does it mean for you, if you're planning to buy a home audio system? Talk this through with your installer but get an unequivocal statement about AIFF before you sign on the dotted line.

I’ll admit it, I’ve lost track of time. We’ve been so busy these last few weeks it’s been heads down, nose to the grindstone, backs to the wall. Just didn’t look at the calendar. CD ripping like crazy.

We have several amazing clients but one I think of each year is the lady who has bought a Christmas voucher every year for four years. On Monday she rang to remind me what time of the year it is, yes, it’s voucher time. This year we’ve added a bit of a twist, the chance to secure a 10% discount simply by paying in advance. You can take the discount either by paying that bit less for the voucher or by having an extra 10% of CDs ripped by us. Alternatively we’ll bill you after the project is complete.

Click here to read more about our Christmas vouchers.

How time flies, about a year ago we undertook a large CD ripping project for a client, around 600 CDs into AIFF format. He is a teacher, which has nothing to do with the fact that he was planning to put all his music onto a NAS drive.Why a NAS? Mainly because he intended to buy a Sonos system and the NAS would enable him to access his digital music without having to leave his computer on. With young children he's prefer to be able to switch his computer off in the evening so his small children wouldn't be disturbed. He couldn't decide whether to go for a simple single drive NAS or a RAID based system. We decided the best thing to do would be to put his music onto basic USB hard drive, he could then copy that across to the NAS drive when he'd bought it.He rang at the beginning of the week. It's half term and his homework was to copy the music onto the NAS drive. I know its a long delayed project but he'd changed jobs, you know how time flies. Two days in and he was having problems.The NAS drive has a USB port and he'd hoped he'd be able to simply copy back from the USB drive into the NAS. That isn't a facility supported by this unit. Those I've looked at only allow the USB port to be used to copy off the NAS and onto a USB as a backup. I'm sure someone, somewhere, will add this feature but so far as I know not just yet. He'd found that out not just from the manual but by trying to make it work. So on Monday he connected everything up and started the process of copying the contents of the hard drive across. It was going badly.His USB drive was connected to his laptop, which connects wirelessly to his router, and that connects directly to his NAS via an ethernet cable. He felt confident the process would go smoothly as he has a swish router with the latest N level data transfer rate. By late Tuesday he was running out of patience. He'd been forced to abandon several copy runs (just seemed to hang with no observable progress), as the data transfer process got underway there were protests from kids and wife, the task seemed to kill the network. Worst the progress bar, when it moved, did so very slowly. He despaired that he'd actually get all the data across before the half term holiday was over. He rang for help.First thing to have in mind is the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. There's the music, plus the overhead of the many commands and acknowledgements that are built into any network operation. Wirelessly this is much slower than over ethernet, and there's the additional overhead of traffic conflicts, interference with the signal, bodies walking around. Massive data transfer over the airwaves are exceptionally slow. You really need to ditch the Wi-Fi and go with a bit of blue cable. As a rough guide I'd expect a wireless transfer of this amount of data would take around 150 hours. Yes, that's a lot of hours.Valuing domestic harmony, and seeing the horizon of the end of the holiday fast approaching he brought both drives over here and we did it across our network. I set it to run at about 18:30 and it was done before 09:00 the next morning. The first prediction from the progress bar was 14 hours but I think the final stop watch would have been short of that. We used an ancient Belkin router, if we'd done it across the new Apple router that's sat there waiting to be configured I'm sure it would have been faster.