The Basics

What exactly is this service?

Instead of doing the encoding yourself you provide us with the CDs and tell us what digital music format you want. We take care of the rest. On this site you will find plenty of information as to the wide variety of options we offer as well as help on choosing the digital formats that are right for you.

We aim to make this a simple, enjoyable and above all useful service to you, our favorite customer!

Why would I want this service?

Converting your CDs to a digital music format lets you play them on the large number of small portable digital music players available today. Some players are designed to be small and robust (ideal for taking to the gym), some are larger but with larger capacities (enabling you to take your entire music collection with you wherever you go), some are both high capacity and small (such as Apple's iPod mini). However, converting your music takes time and the knowledge of which format and settings to use.

Even if you don't have a portable music player but have a large music collection (more than 100 CDs) and a PC then you can benefit from organizing your collection and keeping it easily available at your fingertips.

Here are reasons why converting your CDs to digital music format using our equipment and expertise makes sense:

OK, so how does it work?

It's as easy as 1-2-3 (you just knew we were going to say that!):

Step One:   Browse this site and figure out which formats and other services you want. We provide an extensive catalog, an FAQ, a glossary and a unique service wizard to help you make that choice. Once you've figured out what you want then place an order. Don't worry if you don't count your CDs correctly - we will charge you 20% up front and an exact charge upon completion - see step 3

Step Two:   When we receive your order we will send you a customer shipping package. This includes all the materials you need to pack up your CDs and ship them to us. All shipments are insured for $12 per CD shipped. Alternatively you can use our drop off option and save shipping costs.

Step Three:   When we receive your CDs we will notify you we've got them and we'll keep you updated with a status throughout the encoding process. When the encoding process is completed (usually with 5 days - depending on how busy we are) we will contact you with an exact service charge (based on the number of CDs received and any CDs (optionally) resurfaced). After final payment is received we will ship your CDs back along with the digital music files on the media of your choice. Then all that's left is for you to enjoy your newly freed music collection.

When you receive your DVD (or set of CDs) of encoded music files from us, you can take one of the following steps (the choice is yours):

Play directly on your MP3 capable set-top DVD or CD player:    Many modern DVD and CD players will play MP3 files directly - so now you can take approximately 100 albums with you to work on just one DVD.

Transfer to your computer:   The DVD or CDs that we provide you are designed to make it easy to transfer your collection onto your computer. This is often the first step for using with a portable player or with a jukebox application. Please see How do I transfer my collection to my computer? for details of how to do this.

Load your portable player or jukebox application:   This step is highly dependent on the equipment and/or software that you have installed. We have some instructions for the most popular devices on our resources page, but all the devices you have should have clear instructions in the manual they came with.

Is this service legal?

We're glad you asked!  Yes, as long as you provide us with original CDs which you own and keep the copies for your own use.  We return the originals along with the encoding to you.  FYCD does not keep a copy (because that would be illegal).

When ordering the service we ask you to indicate that you are the owner of the CDs.  If you ever dispose of the original (e.g. sell it at a yard sale), it will be your responsibility to destroy copies.

We're no fans of the RIAA or the MPAA (we won't say more); but we do respect that copyright is important and we strictly monitor our compliance.  If you provide us a non-original we simply won't process it and will return it to you.

Why choose FYCD?

• we have the widest range of available services
• we have the most flexible pricing allowing you to choose just the services that you want (and not paying for those that you don't)
• we have the widest range of readily available encoding options
• we will continue to expand the available encoding options as new technologies become available
• our unique "DIY" service allows you to take advantage of new encoding technologies without having to return your CDs to us
• we offer the smallest batch size (just 25 CDs) allowing you to try us out because we're confident that you will be back!

Questions about our service

How do I choose the right media?

If you don't have a DVD-ROM drive in your PC or you're not sure about compatibility then choose CD-Rs. They're gauranteed to work.

How do I choose the right bitrate?

The higher the bitrate the higher the quality - it's as simple as that. However, nothing's for free - so, the higher the bitrate the larger the files are. So, on the small flash memory player you might want to choose a lower bitrate (such as 64kbps or 96kbps) so that you can get more music onto the device. For your iPod (or other hard disk based portable player) you probably want to choose 128kbps to 160kbps - this is a good trade off between size and quality (many people refer to this as CD quality [we disagree - see the next paragraph]). If you want to pump your music through your hi-fi then we suggest you choose a lossless encoding format (either a WAVE file which is the raw encoding or a lossless compression format which can save about 50% disk space without loosing any quality).

But hang on, you said that people refer to 128kbps as 'CD quality'... Yes, they do - if you can't tell the difference between a 128kbps music file and listening to your original CD on the equipment that you intend to use in the environment in which you intend to use it then you're fine with 128kbps. However, many people can tell the difference and here's why. All the non-lossless music codecs use a lossy compression algorithm - that means some of the original information content of the music is 'thrown away' to make the file smaller. These codecs use very clever psychoacoustic algorithms to figure out what data they can throw away while minimizing the affect on the listener. However these psychoacoustic algorithms are based on the 'average listener' (i.e. how the average person's ears and brain responds to sound). Not everyone is the same - so some people really do have 'golden ears' and can tell the difference. Even though people can't always describe the difference they consistently choose the higher encoding format in testing. So, if you consider yourself an audiophile then consider either a high bit rate (256kbps or above) or a lossless codec. If you're content with your standard ears, or if you intend to blast the music out over an FM transmitter to your car radio then 128kbps is probably just fine.

Of course, at FYCD we're pleased to say that we recognize that one size doesn't fit all and our services provide you an economic way to sample your music at many different bitrates. Enjoy!

What restoration services do you offer?

• Jitter Correction: This type of restoration is performed on all discs. It is a non-intrusive process (i.e. it doesn't change your CD in any way). If the FYCD ripping process detects inconsistencies in the data stream coming from the CD (e.g. because of a minor imperfection or dirt) we automatically re-read that data and attempt to fix it. This service is free and can restore minor damage that causes CDs to skip or crackle in regular audio CD players.
• Resurfacing: For more severely damaged discs we can resurface the disk. We do so by using the Skip Dr Pro line of products. This process can remove surface scratches and can make otherwise unplayable discs playable again. Because this is actually affecting your CDs (but with a market proven process) we only do this at your request. This process is time consuming for us and, if a disc is badly damaged we might not be able to repair it - but heck, we'll try if you want us to! As a favor to us we'd appreciate it if you would seperate your damaged disks and put them on the top of the spindle marked with a sticky note (we'll even provide the sticky note!). If you don't then we'll still try to hunt down those damaged discs for you.

Why don't you accept jewel cases?

Who chooses what genre a particular album falls into?

Note that we said this is the basis for our own database. Over time we are correcting some of this information (we submit those corrections back to the freedb.org database) and once we've corrected an item we no longer use the freedb info. The one area where it's hardest for us to correct is genre - because that's subjective info. To an afficianado thrash metal is as different from heavy metal as Bach is from Beethoven - to others it's all heavy metal (and to those less diverse in their tastes it's just noise - but that's there loss, right?). Anyway - what this means for you is that you might see genre classifications for your album that you disagree with. Don't worry we provide tools where you can correct the problem and we also let you choose to not organize your music by genre to help minimize the problem.

Why do you charge 20% up front and then request a balance of payment later?

Why don't we charge nothing up front and then everything at the end? By the time we know how much to charge a customer we've already done the work. You're our favorite customer and we know you will pay - but (and this might shock you) some people don't pay their bills! If that one customer in a thousand doesn't pay then we will return their CDs to him (or her) without the new digital music collection but we will keep the 20% to cover the work done. You can see our (fair and concise) terms of service for more details.

Other Sources of Digital Music

Why can't I use a music download service to get digital copies of the music I already own?

Commercial Services

• The big problem here is cost - you will have to repurchase every song you own at 99 cents per song (not per CD!) That gets mighty expensive mighty fast. But there are other serious drawbacks as well even if you do have money to burn. Read on to learn why you can still get better value from us.
• There is no one online service for your entire collection. You will have to trawl through several different sites to find your tracks. At the time of writing there is no aggregate service to direct you to the commercial site that has your CD, also there is no guarantee that your CD is even available commercially.
• You will only receive one copy of the music encoded at a set rate and different sites use different formats.
• Most of the large sites use some form of DRM, which severely limits your usage of the received files. Note that removing the DRM from such a file is most likely to put you in violation of the DCMA because the DCMA makes it illegal to defeat an encryption method. See the glossary or Why can't you offer this service for DVD's for more information on the DCMA. See What is "fair use" and why should I care? for a brief discussion of DRM and how it affects you.

• The big issue here is questionable legality - while it is probably (and note we only say probably) legal to download digital encodings of tunes that you already legally own, it's a grey area because no one is checking the truthfulness of your statements (at FYCD we will only encode from an original CD to ensure that you have ownership). This leads to things like lawsuits from the RIAA - while you could probably disuade them from taking you to court if you could persuade them you already legally owned the CDs, do you really want the hassle of dealing with a pending lawsuit from a litigously-happy organization (the RIAA recently sued about 1,000 individuals (including a 12 year old girl!)).
• Even if you decide to risk embroiling yourself in a lawsuit (we salute your courage to stand up for your fair use rights!) you will find that the file sharing world is a wild place. It is true that the major services like Kazaa attempt to do some policing and filtering of content to protect you from viruses and offensive material they're largely at the mercy of their users. In other words, be careful you don't download a virus or end up with pornography when you expected Britney Spears.
• The final sticking point with file sharing is the quality of the encoding. It varies widely: some is great some not so great. The only way to find out is to download a few versions and pick the one that sounds best to you. At that point you'd be better ripping each CD you own yourself.

Should I continue to buy CDs or should I switch to a download service?

• Not only do DRM and different encoding standards make it difficult to manage for you but it also effectively limits the usefulness of the files produced:
  • Each service uses DRM to limit your fair use rights - for example limiting the number of PCs you can use to play the music and only allowing the music to be "checked out" on to one portable player at a time.
  • Each service appears to be intended to service the owners of medium capacity MP3 players tending to encode at between 128Kbps to 160Kbps. This is not necessarily a bad encoding rate for portable players - but if you want to listen to the music at the highest possible fidelity then s.o.l. (so outta luck!). Or if you have a low capacity device and don't mind FM radio quality tunes you could "downcode" to a lower bit rate (but this won't be as high a quality as downcoding from
• CDs are still a widely accepted and thus widely useful medium. How many CD players do you have access to? Compare that to how many digital music players. FYCD is about giving you maximum value - FYCD is not about converting you to digital music to continue to fund the profits of the music industry.
• CDs are encoded at 2 channels of 16bit PCM at 44.1KHz which gives a bit rate of 1,411.2Kbps compare that to 128Kbps offered at many online music stores. It's not true to say that CD is 10 times better than the 128Kbps encoded format - but it is true to say that the CD is the best quality digital encoding of analog music that you can get. Let's not forget that most musicians still use analog instruments!

If you want to sample different musical styles and new artists then the download route is a great way to go - you can pick and choose one or two tracks from a wide variety of genres and end up with a fantastic and eclectic personal mix. Go try it - it is a great way to buy! Of course if you find an artist you really like we still suggest you buy their whole album on CD (and then rip it yourself!) Of course if you want to sample a range of music there's a way to do it for free - it's called radio (either analog or digital will do) but of course you can't record from the radio without breaking copyright laws (so don't do it!)