Just as companies have sprung up to take advantage of eBay’s success by offering to relieve sellers of manual labor, services have popped up in the wake of the iPod’s dominant market share with promises to rip customers’ CD collections to the popular MP3 player and save them the time. Most of those businesses, however, handle CD and iPod pick-ups and drop-offs personally, which means you need to live near them. That changed when a new Atlanta-based company announced on Monday that its iRip service will use UPS shipping to complete the task, and it’s boasting the lowest per-CD price available.
For US$1 per CD, iRip will take your CD collection and transfer it to your iPod, encoded in Apple Lossless or AAC format. You simply set up your order through the iRip Web site and wait for a crush-proof box to arrive via UPS. You place a minimum of 30 CDs and your iPod in the box and ship it back, with the ability to track your order’s status through the company’s Web site. Standard service includes three-way UPS ground shipping, while those who are in a hurry can spend $3 per CD for UPS overnight shipping. iRip accepts any generation of the Apple iPod, as well as iPod mini and the Apple iPod by HP, and notes that their employees are Apple-certified professionals.