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Tags : Announcements & News, Digital Music Player Gear

More Than Blings the Ear

Posted on 25 October 2006 by


Joel sent me this clever gift idea for those that have been stumped over what to buy the “girly-girl” on their shopping list…

Riptopia, the service that converts CD collections to digital media for people who either don’t have the patience or don’t have the hardware, has also been selling pre-loaded iPods for some time.

From November 1st through January 15th, they will be offering a special package which consists of a 4GB iPod Nano in blue, pink or green that comes pre-loaded with the gift recipient’s 50 favorite CDs and a free pair of matching Swarovski crystal encrusted headphones. 

shuganano_riptopia_001

Let’s do the math…

A 4GB iPod nano is $199, so for an additional $60 you get 50 CDs ripped and loaded (by someone other than you!) and a set of matching blingy earphones. This sounds like a pretty good deal, actually.

I would like mine in green, please. ;-)

WASHINGTON, DC, OCTOBER, 24, 2005) — Riptopia is taking iPod Nano’s latest colors to the next level.  Introducing the ShugaNano ($259), a brilliant new green, blue or pink 4GB iPod Nano that comes pre-loaded with 50 of your favorite CDs and a matching pair of Swarovski Crystal encrusted headphones.

Available for the limited time of November 1 to January 15, the ShugaNano not only spices up the gift of a traditional iPod but makes enjoying it that much easier.  As with all Riptopia iPods, the ShugaNano eliminates the grunt work of having to get your entire CD collection onto your new iPod – Riptopia does it for you. 

The process is simple.  Visit www.riptopia.com , choose between ShugaNano’s blue, pink or green colors and place your order.  Riptopia will ship either you or your recipient (you choose at checkout) a gift box that includes a 50 CD spindle and pre-postage paid insured shipping materials. Inside the gift box, your recipient will also receive a gift card that explains that they are the new owner of a Riptopia ShugaNano.

Gift recipients simply slide their 50 favorite CDs onto the spindle and ship back to Riptopia using the pre-postage paid insured shipping materials. In 48 hours or less, they receive back their 50 favorite CDs, their new iPod Nano fully loaded with their 50 favorite CDs, a matching pair of ShugaBuds, and a personalized DVD digital music library.

ABOUT RIPTOPIA

Founded by a talented team of information technology professionals, Riptopia, Inc. is a National digital processing and CD ripping service with digital music processing centers in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, CA. Riptopia, Inc.’s industrial strength ripping servers create organized digital music libraries in a variety of standards including MP3, WMA and WMA lossless and FLAC. Riptopia Inc.’s partnership with Gracenote and Muze provides the standard in digital metadata and CD recognition technology with the cleanest metadata DB of over 62 million titles. Riptopia, Inc. provides uploading service onto a variety of digital music equipment including media centers, music servers and iPods. In August 2006, Riptopia acquired its strongest competitor RipDigital to extend its national retail presence. For more information on Riptopia, Inc., visit www.riptopia.com or call 800-874-4921.

 

This post was written by:

- who has written 1699 posts on Gear Diary.

I started Gear Diary on September 30, 2006, and my goal was that this not be an easily labeled site. We all have gear that we use daily – some of it electronic and some of it organic. I think it is fascinating to explore the equipment that makes our lives easier, more entertaining, more productive, and more manageable. My hope is that Gear Diary visitors will find this site to be a comfortable and friendly place to discuss interesting topics – and not only those that are tech related, as well as a location to discover various types of gear – whatever that term may end up implying – that they never knew existed. My specialty is in-depth reviews written in a layman’s terms, because everyone can understand technology, sometimes it just takes a little translating. +Judie Stanford

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  • perryman

    Neat idea, but what happens when you get the loaded iPod back and try to plug it into your computer to put some additional music on it? Since iPods only allow pairing with one computer, i’m guessing it’ll erase those 50 ripped CDs in favor of whatever you happen to have in iTunes on your computer.

  • http://www.geardiary.com Judie

    That’s a good question! I don’t know if this is aimed at someone who would not plan on adding more songs (in other words won’t hook their iPod to a computer), or if the option is to load a compiled data CD of some kind to the host computer. Let me see if I can get those answers and I will get right back with ya! :-)

  • WonderDawg

    Or worse, 50 CDs of 30 second snippets… perfect for those with very, very short attention spans.

    OK, my short attention span collided with my reading comprehension… If I want to be cynical for a second, it’s a sweet deal for the low wage operator at the controls too… “Dude, I always wanted the entire Beatles catalog on my iPod too!”

    Great way for an entity to access legit copies of music. I seem to recall waaay back in the LP days a record chain “renting records” to record on cassette before the RIAA police showed up to say that’s a no-no.

    Last log on the fire: a blogger asked is it morally right to copy CD’s from a public library? (I’ll have to find the link…)

  • http://www.geardiary.com Judie

    “OK, my short attention span collided with my reading comprehension… If I want to be cynical for a second, it’s a sweet deal for the low wage operator at the controls too… “Dude, I always wanted the entire Beatles catalog on my iPod too!””

    I admit it! That thought crossed my mind, too. ;-)

  • http://www.girlsgonemobile.net mobilejenneth

    perryman, you don’t need to be “paired” to a computer to transfer music from iTunes to an iPod. Pairing it to a computer means that all of the songs on the PC are automatically transferred to the iPod. There’s no reason for Riptopia to set the iPod up in this way on the PC they use to transfer music across, and connecting that iPod to your PC would then bring up a prompt asking if you would like to replace the music library on the iPod with the one on your PC. If you decline to do this, then you can still drag and drop music from your iTunes library manually.

    What this setup does preclude, however, is being able to set up automatic syncing on your own PC, as doing so would get rid of all the music that’s been loaded onto it by Riptopia. Naturally there are workarounds available that let you transfer music from the iPod to your PC, but for the sort of customer that would be taking up this service, it’s not likely something they’d know how to do.

  • perryman

    I did not realize that you could transfer music to and from an unpaired iPod! I know you can transfer files, assuming you have it set up as a hard drive, but not music. I’ll have to give it a try.

  • http://www.geardiary.com Judie

    Directly from Riptopia:

    There is actually an auto-sync switch on the iPod that we turn off on our end to avoid the wiping clean of the iPod once it is hooked up with a computer.
    According to our teach team, it should be noted that the iPod is not meant to be used to load songs into your iTunes library. The correct way to do this is to use the Riptopia DVD Digital Music Library to populate your iTunes library first. This way, even if you connect your iPod, the songs there will be represented in your iTunes music library and therefore should not be deleted.