The Geek Squad’s Newest Racket: CD Ripping
Building on a proud tradition of charging for things that shouldn’t cost anything, Best Buy’s crack team of dudes will now rip your CDs, for the low low price of $US1 a disc.
Lest you judge too quickly, let’s take a look at the Geek Squad’s latest service in their own words:
CD conversion requires care and expertise. We’ll rip your CD collection into MP3, AAC, WAV, WMA, WMA-Lossless, or OGG formats, and return it to you (along with your CDs) on DVDs
Translation: We’ll take whatever is on your disc and put it on another disc.
We pull quality, accurate metadata from multiple sources such as AMG and GD3 and rip your CDs with the finest error correction software. We also hand-groom your digital music collection making searching and organizing your collection a breeze and ready to play as soon as you receive it.
Translation: We have iTunes.
Wondering where we are with your conversion? Simply login on our website and view the status of your order at any time.
Translation: This is going to take a while.
Have a few CDs with peanut butter and jelly on them?
Translation: You are clearly an idiot.
Need an iPod, hard drive, or music server with your CD Ripping? Add it to your cart and we’ll transfer (load) your entire collection to the selected hardware FREE of charge.
Translation: And now that we know you’re an idiot, we would like to steal from you.
I’m sure there’s a market for this—old folks? the chronically lazy? someone’s been paying for this shit for years—but really, you’re paying a dollar for someone to click on a few buttons, and pass it off as something that you can’t do yourself. Or hey, maybe I’m being unfair. Let me know! Just email me your thoughts, and I’ll post them as comments for, let’s say $US0.50 a word? Great. [Consumerist]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
How do you email someone? Can you teach me that for less fee?
Yes, unfortunately these people do exist.
I know a decorator who we work with at our furniture shop. She used a neighbor kid to set up her iPod to her computer. And He had to do the first batch of CDs, untill she finally learned how.
This was about 2 years ago, she has worked her way up to email AND shopping on Amazon.
I know everyone who reads Gizmodod articles is a technology genius, but there really are some people who are clueless. Shocking, right? Everyone isn’t as smart and technologically savvy as you. Hard to believe.
Everyone likes to rip on Geek Squad, but if someone resorts to this service, they obviously have NO CLUE what they’re doing with technology and hence actually need this service. This is just good business for Best Buy.
Is it any more ridiculous than having someone change your oil? Cars have required oil changes for 100 years. And you still can’t do it yourself? Then you are obviously a moron and the oil change place is ripping you off.
Itunes does not support OGG formats like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.
HAHAHAH, so they use DBpoweramp to rip your music for you, then take copies of it…. and charge you… too damn funny.
Even though I’m quite technically proficient, a service like this would actually appeal to me. My time is worth more to me than the $1 per CD it takes to rip music. I’ve got 300-400 CDs in a box, quite a few of which I’d like to rip, but don’t have the time to do it. It would take me weeks to get them all ripped, and the ones that aren’t in CDDB, it’d takes quite some time to enter the track details.
Couldn’t this be construed as a form of piracy? I know you are allowed to make a back-up copy of music (if you own it) for yourself, but what is the right of a third-party doing it for you? What is to stop one of these highly ethical and oh-so-trustworthy employees from sneaking off with a copy?
So on the flip side.
If someone was say, to offer a cleaning service, but I can clearly do it myself…
“I will clean your house”
Translation: I am doing what at 12year old can do, so you must be 12 too!.