Murfie is gone, and so are all the CDs people sent to them

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by pathosdrama, Dec 13, 2019.

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  1. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Yeah, this was a huge hole in their service and I agree. Music collectors - who would seem to be their core customer - are super picky about stuff like that, which made Murfie's model problematic from the get go.

    Not surprised to hear they started out as a ripping service. I'd imagine they survived longer than most of them, so this switchover bought them quite a few years in spite of being several years too late to market in my opinion. Are any ripping services even still in business?
     
  2. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    I believe that they think so, it's all I read over and over again in the ripping threads. I'm tempted to go offer up my services somewhere, being that many folks still have not replaced their collections with digital files, and just pay for streaming instead.
     
    BayouTiger likes this.
  3. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I did it back in 2004, and it was difficult and time consuming. Lots of issues with bad rips and the drives were slower back then. I'm technically literate and was able to work around it, but most people aren't and many wouldn't want to be bothered even if they were capable. There are certainly better ways to spend your evenings than babysitting your computer thru a bunch of rips and then faffing with the metadata in (back then) Musicmatch Jukebox.

    Later of course it became easier, but still not foolproof, and a lot of people just freak at the idea of doing anything on their computer more complicated than sending an e-mail. But they might want everything ripped so they can get it on their iPod or - later - stream it over a Sonos like their friends have.

    Digging thru that mountain of crap would take even a large team years. I'm sure you could make a lot of money flipping any rare stuff online, but what that would translate to in an hourly rate after you paid to continue renting the warehouse and paying the electric bill would probably not amount to a minimum wage salary.
     
    uzn007 likes this.
  4. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    If they haven't ripped by now it's never happening.
     
    uzn007 likes this.
  5. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Well, one would need to do sorting of the good stuff from the junk in a parking lot near a thrift store. So you only keep the $9.00 and up merch. The lower level just goes right to Goodwill by the carload, and the good stuff is boxed up in a certain order. So storage is paid only for those goodies SH Forum member types wet their panties over. LOL
     
  6. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Yeah, that doesn't work when you need to house a warehouse full of stuff before slowly sifting thru it all. This isn't one box of CDs someone dumped on a curb.
     
  7. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    All it's going to take for them to get with it is 5 albums they feel like hearing and no go. Times Fades Away, or some other things they want to hear is a no-go. Ripping starts to look more interesting.
     
  8. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    You really don't know how many discs are there do you? Nor do I. But I am fast as sorting, and know a $50 disc or a $100 one and I know a good rare box set when it sitting in front of me. I know a MFSL or DCC gold from 20 or 1000 feet way.

    They might not have that many discs. The only worry is that the owners cherry picked it to death before throwing in the towel.
     
  9. misterdecibel

    misterdecibel Bulbous Also Tapered

    I have a 2019 vehicle and it does still have a CD player, but the slot is hidden in the glove box.
     
  10. bluesky

    bluesky Senior Member

    Location:
    south florida, usa
    ("Us and Them") NEVER ever trust Them.

    :shake:
     
    Last edited: Dec 14, 2019
  11. Carl Swanson

    Carl Swanson Senior Member

    Read above. They disposed of the jewel cases.
     
    sunspot42 likes this.
  12. uzn007

    uzn007 Pack Rat

    Location:
    Raleigh, N.C.
    It's hilarious that people are suggesting calling the police, getting a court injunction, etc. "But officer, my CD's!" I ain't no lawyer but this seems like a cut and dried case of a business ceasing operation, at which it would move to bankruptcy court and/or private lawsuits, wouldn't it?

    In practical terms, as others have mentioned, they almost certainly failed to pay the rent on whatever storage facility held the CD's (or will soon) and those CD's are scattered to the four winds by now. Given the current market, they're probably in a landfill.
     
    sunspot42 and dkmonroe like this.
  13. uzn007

    uzn007 Pack Rat

    Location:
    Raleigh, N.C.
    As someone else mentioned, this may have been prohibited for copyright reasons.
     
  14. uzn007

    uzn007 Pack Rat

    Location:
    Raleigh, N.C.
    I think you're misjudging that. Look at the responses in this thread: "No way." "I'm not letting anybody touch my CD collection." "Not while I'm alive," etc. Those are music collectors (and I love you all dearly, my brothers!). Their core customer would have been the casual music fan -- in the days before Spotify -- who wanted to virtualize their collection and have easy access to it anywhere without dealing with physical discs.
     
    Crimson Witch, bdfin and dkmonroe like this.
  15. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Oh... then storage space would even be much less. A U-Haul truck and I'm so f'in outta there....
     
  16. uzn007

    uzn007 Pack Rat

    Location:
    Raleigh, N.C.
    This contemporary article that was linked in the other thread is worth a read:

    Wis. Business Hopes To Help Break The CD Habit

    * * *

    Carter Hooper had a problem. The 51-year-old from New Orleans had spent years lugging around his collection of 900 CDs.

    "Those things survived Katrina, actually," he says. "I was in Katrina; I was in Biloxi, Miss., in a building that almost got blown away, but I had stacked those precious things up in the closet."

    Then, Hooper discovered Murfie, a business in Madison, Wis., where he could ship all of his CDs for free and still retain ownership of them.

    Murfie is a lot of things to a lot of people. But to Hooper, it was a dream come true: Murfie will burn your old discs to a digital file, recycle the cases and even resell the album online. It's part garage sale, part iTunes.
     
    BrilliantBob and sunspot42 like this.
  17. dkmonroe

    dkmonroe A completely self-taught idiot

    Location:
    Atlanta
    Yeah, this would seem like at best a class action lawsuit thing. And the CDs have almost certainly been discarded.
    No serious collector would have used this service unless it offered two way free shipping and you had your property back within a couple weeks. Every serious CD collector here expresses the tangibility of the collection as part of the benefit, so no one serious about collecting is likely to send there CDs off to boarding school indefinitely so they can stream them in a lossy format. Can you imagine anyone sending off a collection of target CDs or DCCs or MoFis to languish in a warehouse indefinitely? No way. This may be the saving grace for whoever remains to hold the bag for this - those who used the service may be reluctantly willing to write off their collections rather than pursue costly litigation.
     
    Grant and uzn007 like this.
  18. sublemon

    sublemon Forum Resident

    totally dumb idea, not sure why anyone would have ever wanted to use this service. even with thousands of CDs I never had an issue with ripping them, streaming myself storage, etc. Was a service for lazy and/or incompetent people IMO.
     
    vegafleet, Grant and formu_la like this.
  19. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    No it doesn't. They'll just go listen to something else. That's exactly what's happening on streaming services now.

    They likely have well north of a hundred thousand discs. No one person is sorting thru those quickly. Do you know how effing boring that's gonna be, picking thru 1,000 copies of Jagged Little Pill and Dookie every day?

    Bingo!
     
  20. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Nah, folks around here are fanatics. There are plenty of more casual collectors who have huge libraries but aren't as anal retentive about it.

    Or busy people. When I was working north of 60 hours a week a service like this might have looked a lot more appealing. My time is pretty valuable to spend doing something as boring as ripping CDs.

    I do other stupid things with my time - like post here - but I like writing. Ripping CDs? Not so much...
     
    DigMyGroove likes this.
  21. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    No, I can’t be the only one to reject them over missing content. There must be others. I mean I am quite unique and special and all, but there are others.
     
    Carl Swanson likes this.
  22. pathosdrama

    pathosdrama Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Firenze, Italy
    There are, it's just that the large majority of people who use streaming services doesn't care.
     
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  23. Synthfreek

    Synthfreek I’m a ray of sunshine & bastion of positivity

    Looks like you didn’t read where this is over 1,000,000 CDs nor the part where it was mentioned that the jewel cases are disposed of.
     
    sunspot42, Tullman and Gaslight like this.
  24. showtaper

    showtaper Concert Hoarding Bastard

    If they didn't download their content and only used the streaming service they have nothing. It does seem from further reading that they were sent multiple messages with clearly stated deadlines on how to retrieve their collections.
     
  25. BrilliantBob

    BrilliantBob Select, process, CTRL+c, CTRL+z, ALT+v

    Location:
    Romania
    :laughup:
     
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