Amazon's "AutoRip" Feature. Anyone use this?

For many years I pirated music like a motherfucker. You couldn't get me to pay for shit, I was all about the Napster and Pirate Bay and Kazaa and all these other programs. I would basically just amass a shitload of music that I would never listen to, but I wanted. Entire discographies of artists that seemed "Cool" to me, so I would be like "check this out bitches!" and there in all it's glory was my magnificent music collection in it's many hundreds of gigabyte size.

Now I pay for probably 95% of everything I get. If I pirate it, it's one of two reasons:

A. It's out of print and/or it's just ridiculously priced. Usually if it's ridiculously priced, it's because it's out of print and 3rd party sellers are gauging the shit out of it. I ain't paying those old school crazy prices for music anymore.

B. It's something that I've bought repeatedly in the past and lost, and am just like "Fuck this shit, I'm not buying another copy of this album. I'm all about supporting the artist, but come on."

Amazon has a copy of every album I've ever bought stored in their Cloud and I can re-download everything at a moment's notice.

According to my Amazon Cloud player I have 355 albums, ZERO of which count against my storage. As an Amazon account holder (not Prime) I get 5GB storage for music bought OUTSIDE of Amazon. Anything bout on Amazon automatically is added to the cloud, and I get my copy downloaded.

Well, they have introduced a feature called "Autorip" a year or so ago, where you buy certain hard copies (CD/Vinyl) you automatically get an MP3 copy put into your folder while you wait for your CD or Vinyl to reach you. That way you can just listen to the album immediately while you wait for delivery.

This is kind of cool, because often the MP3 copy is more expensive than the CD copy.

I just bought two albums recently on there because I'd been wanting them but for some reason I did not have them.

1. Tracy Chapman's debut album (with the classic hits "Fast Car" and "Talking Bout A Revolution")
2. Marvin Gaye's classic "What's Going On?".

Interestingly enough, the Marvin album I thought I had bought, but I bought the 20th anniversary edition which came with an excellent live recording at the Kennedy Center in 1972, along with an "alternate Detroit Mix" of the 1971 classic.

I was frustrated thinking I had the original because for whatever reason I've never listened to the original "What's Going On?" Heard a podcast the other day with Wyatt Cenac (The Daily Show) on Marc Maron's podcast, and he was talking about it. I'd heard all the songs, just not regular. Always live or whatever.

Anyway.

The MP3's were $9, but the CD was $6 and change. The Tracy Chapman was $6 for the CD and $8 for the MP3.

Sometimes the MP3's are a bit cheaper and so I do that, but this Autorip is a helluva deal if you maintain a digital collection.

Amazon has a similar deal with books apparently, although not nearly as extensive. Buy certain books and you get the ebook at a discount.

I like the AutoRip feature. It's pretty nice that I can listen to my album as soon as I buy it. And as you said, it's also pretty cool that all the stuff you buy doesn't count toward your cap and you can download as many times as you want. Google Play only lets you download stuff you buy twice which I think is bullshit.

This is why I rarely if ever buy from iTunes. If they'd let me re-download my purchases that would be one thing.

Although there is a nice unexpected Piracy related twist to iTunes storage thing. You can take your collection, and upload it to your itunes cloud account, and say they are all shitty 128K or whatever you've gotten from various torrent sites or whatever.

Well it basically replaces those with high quality copies, so you upload your shitty quality ones and you can then download higher quality "legit" copies. lol.

I read about that years ago but don't know if they ever tweaked anything as a result.

I was not aware iTunes gives you better quality MP3's. But iTunes does let me redownload my stuff. I purchased something a long long time ago before they implemented the "cloud" icon in iTunes. Recently, I re-downloaded an album three times. Seems okay to me unless you're referring to something else.