My Music Disc Copier

Introduction

My Music Disc Copier is a fully automated CD ripper, that allows you to automatically copy your music cd's directly to the Home Servers storage making it available to Media Centers, such as Microsoft Media Center, Media Portal, Beyond TV, SaveTV and many others, gaming devices such as Playstation 3 or Xbox 360, and music playback devices such as Logitech Squeezebox, Sonos Digital Music Systems and many others.

Your music can be copied either to lossless music formats such as Windows Media Audio Lossless or Flac, or to highly compressed Windows Media Audio or MP3 files, or a combination, allowing you to store a primary format for in-house playback, and a secondary format for mobile devices.

CD Ripping have never been easiser, simply insert a CD into an optical drive, and the copy process will start automatically, while you have a full detailed overview in your Windows Home Server console, after a few minutes, depending on the target format you have choosen, and the processing power of your Home Server, the disc will again be ejected from the drive.

Optical Drive Requirement

CD Ripping of course requires an optical CD, DVD or Blu-ray drive connected to your Windows Home Server - while many home built Home Servers may already have an internal drive attached, most factory shipped products does not include an optical drive, in which case you can add any USB 2.0 or eSATA connected drive. After a reboot, the My Music Disc Copier automatically recognizes the drive, and will automatically detect when a CD is inserted into the drive.

Windows Home Servers is for many devices designed to be placed outside the livingroom, in a basement, in a technician room or similar, and adding an optical drive to the home server might be easy, while adding it in an easy accessible position in the house may be harder - fear not, as the cable length of an USB 2.0 device is 5 meters (16.4 feet), and can be extended with a repeater device, or be used over Cat5e cables by using a USB to Cat5e extender device. 

Advanced Meta-Data

By combining multiple meta-data sources, including Get Digital Data (GD3), MusicBrainz and FreeDB.org, you are ensured as good meta-data as possible, including high resolution album art, and data combining technologies ensuring that typing errors in the data providers meta-data will not make it into your music library.

Meta-data, including both text data and album art is embedded into your music files, and is used to ensure a good naming method on your storage, and also gives you the option to configure the naming scheme you prefer for your files. Intelligent handling of album arts ensures that high resolution album art is added to the music stored for in-house usage, while album art added to mobile music parts is downscaled to save storage space.

As an addition to embedding album art, a high resolution "Folder.jpg" file is also stored to the album folder.

Audio Compression Formats

The My Music Disc Copier can copy to varios music formats; Waveform audio format (WAV), MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3), Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMA) and Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), based on the high quality and award winning Lame MP3 Encoder for MP3, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder for WMA and the Flac library for the very popular upcoming format Flac.

Using the only the best standard audio encoding libries, you are ensured that the My Music Disc Copier gives you the best possible quality each audio format can provide.

Mobile Devices

For your in-house music, it is recommended that you copy your CDs to a lossless audio format, which means that the quality of the music is not degraded by being copied to your server - but, a lossless audio format also takes up more storage space than a highly compressed audio file, and this may be a problem when transferring the music to your mobile devices, such as a iPod, Zune, phone or other mobile music playback device, or, if space is not an issue, your preferred lossless audio format may not be playable on your mobile device.

The My Music Disc Copier allows you to configure two different formats, to be stored in two different areas of your Home Server, recommended the "Music" share for in-house music, and a "Mobile Music" share for music to mobile devices. This allows you to configure your favorite lossless format for the in-house music, while at the same time having the music available in a highly compressed format for quick and easy transfer to your mobile device.

If you copy your in-house music to a lossless format such as Windows Media Audio Lossless or Flac, creating a 64 kbps compressed MP3 or Windows Media Audio file for mobile devices will take up less than 10% additional space on your Home Server's storage.

Pricing

My Music Disc Copier is based on My Movies advanced licensing options, where users create a My Movies user account, and aqquire points for the user account either by contributing movie meta-data to gain the points or by paying for the points directly. This means that you do not pay for a single product, but pay for the right to use our full product suite, not only for Windows Home Server, but in general, and you are not required to pay for continued updates to the programs, but can upgrade the products in their full lifetime without any additional fees.

Usage of the Music Disc Copier requires 1,250 points, equaling a $50 payment to your My Movies account, or a contribution of 30 fully completed movie profiles to our Movie WebService, and also gives you usage rights to the movie disc copier as well as the freely available movie monitoring function.