Can’t decide whether you’d rather buy a CD or purchase the latest album from Weird Al Yankovic in MP3? Amazon’s new AutoRip service means you don’t have to.
When you buy an eligible CD from Amazon, the company will automatically add the MP3 version of the album to your Amazon Cloud Player account, which means you can stream them to any computer or mobile device that supports Cloud Player, or download the MP3s for offline playback. There’s no need to rip the CD yourself once it arrives.
While that’s a pretty nifty incentive to pick up new albums from Amazon, what’s really kind of crazy is that the company is also applying AutoRip retroactively. Any CDs you’ve ordered from Amazon since 1998 are also eligible for AutoRip.
Unfortunately, while I’ve purchased a number of MP3 albums from Amazon over the last few years, a quick search through my order history tells me I’ve never actually paid for a CD from the online retailer.
AutoRip launched today, and right now Amazon says there are about 50,000 eligible albums, but that number should go up over time.
via TechCrunch