About mp3Geo

mp3Geo is a music conversion service with a purpose: to help reignite music lovers' passion by easing their entry into the digital world.

Who can you help?

Anyone with a bunch of CDs to be converted to digital music files. Music conversion is a time-consuming hurdle that can challenge the neophyte and the veteran alike.

Who are you?

My name is George Scarlett. I worked 24 years in the music industry, almost all of it with Tower Records. The first record I ever owned was 'Calcutta' by The Lawrence Welk Orchestra.

mp3Geo and I are headquartered in Davis, California.

Why are you doing this?

I am a music lover, and have been since I could first form memories. I love music for the visceral reactions it evokes and the places it takes me. So you could call this a labor of love.

(One indication: you'll find no ads on this site, except for my own service. The internet needs all the help it can get for its signal-to-noise ratio.) 

At the same time digital music was putting record stores out of business (and me out of a cushy office), it was also making the (re)discovery of music easier than ever before. Digitizing my music (49,000 song files and still growing) and subscribing to a streaming music service (Rhapsody) transformed my hobby. The same transformation can happen to you.

How do we get started?

Drop me a line:mailto:george@mp3Geo.com

Or call:

(530) 308-0876

Cheers!

 

My First Time

 

Q. Tell me about your first experiences with music digitizing.

A. I started out by making two classic blunders. In the business world, these kinds of boo-boos translate into 'experience.'

My first attempt was in the summer of 2001. I had purchased an Archos 6000 Jukebox (6GB), one of the very first hard-drive based portable players. I forged ahead with the barest of knowledge. This gizmo had an advertised capacity of 1500 songs. So I set about ripping 1500 favorites, with a goal of having them all loaded onto the player in time for an October vacation. My choice of conversion rate was the low standard: 128kbps.

My first surprise? The capacity was overstated, just as it is for all players even now. I think I was able to get 1200 or so loaded. The second surprise? The sound quality was terrible. I hadn't done my homework.

The second effort came three years later. The time had come to convert my entire CD collection of about 3500 discs. I remembered well the 2001 debacle, so this time I went to the other extreme. I bought an enormous (and, at the time, very expensive) hard drive, and I ripped all my discs to the WAV format: no compression at all. 600MB of music on a disc translated to 600MB of music on the hard drive.

My first surprise? I learned too late that this format does not export meta-data (e.g. artist/title/artwork) when WAV files are downloaded to a player. The second surprise? I later learned that lossless compression formats cut more than 40% off the file size, sound exactly the same as the original, and the format holds the metadata.

The good news: WAV files are easily transcodable to lossless. I turned iTunes loose on all those WAV's and transformed them into the Apple Lossless files I use today.