2005 May 16

On a recent CD Ripping article…

You nailed this market right on the head! Get Digital launched it's pioneering service 2 years ago, and since then, it does seem like every 14 year old kid with a computer and a website started offering the same product. Basically, the product results are all the same, with one key differentiation: the database.
Nearly all CD ripping programs use a CD lookup database called Gracenote including iTunes. Since the Gracenote provides the CD metadata (artist, album, track info), this is essentially the information which you will use to navigate your digital CD collection, and is plaqued with inconsistent and inaccurate data. If you have 10 CDs, you'll probably never see the problem, but try 400 opera CDs and let us know the results. Larger, deeper CD collections will be so out of order, you'll regret paying anyone for these results they have absolutely no control over.
Get Digital saw this problem with the product very early, and instead of offering the Gracenote result, we opted for entering our own CD data for your CD collection. Years of maticulous data entry give us the most consistent and accurate database which also includes the album art. The results are dramatic. 400 classical or opera CDs are now cataloged correctly. No more mispelled artist names which create a new folder, or 1/2 your Beatles collection being in “Beatles” and the other 1/2 in “The Beatles”. When we finish a collection, we are so proud and confident of our work that we print somewhat of a coffee table book on heavy photo stock. All of our competitors have disclaimers about their data, and would be embarrased to print their results.
Since CD ripping includes these two very important atributes, we quickly narrow down our competition list from the 20 or so “McRip” companies, to just a few who even bother to look at the data, to Get Digital who guarantees the data.
Read the article “It's the Metadata, Stupid” by Sandy Teger and Dave Waks. Please let me know if you have any other questions regarding the CD ripping industry. I appreciate you picking this up as a topic of discussion.
Regards,
Doug Strachota
CEO and Founder
Get Digital, Inc.

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And yes, the dog is still alive. I'm still a Copernic fan, and there are plenty of reasons why.

REDMOND, Wash. – May 15, 2005 – The MSN® network of Internet services today launched the new MSN Search Toolbar with Windows® Desktop Search, a suite of tools that helps people rapidly search across the Web or their PC and provides easy access to world-leading MSN services. The final version of the MSN Search Toolbar includes free enhancements for Windows® 2000 and Windows XP customers, providing a dramatically upgraded desktop search experience. These new innovations for Windows customers will make it easier than ever to find and retrieve documents, e-mail, images, video and more on their Windows-based personal computers.

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