[tptacek]

I have roughly 700 albums that I ripped off little plastic disks in the '90s, all encoded at 192, all riddled with bit errors after being copied through 6-9 different IDE/SATA drives.

This announcement seems great. I will get way more than $25/yr value out of having reliable access to all this music again.

I am not hung up on "how often" I've paid for this music. I bought the CDs; if I wanted to, I could have archived them as carefully as Rob from High Fidelity. I have better things to do with my life. The $25 convenience fee here is buying me a lot of convenience.

If I didn't want the convenience, I wouldn't have to pay for it. I could just rerip. Let me work out my hourly rate and see what kind of return I'm getting for nevermind I'm just going to pay Apple.

[jfager]

I totally agree with you, I was just clarifying the other comment. I've been thinking about uploading my whole collection to Amazon, whose music store I much prefer to iTunes, but an order-of-magnitude price difference is hard to justify. If all this works as advertised, it's going to be an absolutely killer service.

[tjmc]

Completely agree. Ideally they'd also update their Gracenote matching to match tracks to CDs that people hadn't ripped yet. If not, I guess the race will now be on to build a ripper that can encode as fast as possible at the minimum quality level required for a match.