So, I was listening to one of my albums here on my iPod, Hysteria by Def Leppard.  All was going well until the second track ("Rocket").  About half way through the song, it starts skipping like crazy… I think I knew these defects, but conveniently forgot about them until I heard them.  I just came up with an awesome idea that probably will not happen ever, but I thought I would blog it so that in the future if it ever comes to pass, I can have record that it was and Idea I had…. though I'm probably not the first one to think of it.

There needs to be a service that allows you to download an album in MP3/FLAC/WAV… whatever format if you can prove you have the actual CD.  There is already TONS of software that allow you to rip your CDs to any format you'd like, but what if the CD is too scratched to make a clean copy?  You could log into the software, it'd read the TOC on your CD and generate a unique id like to the CDDB id used by CDDB/FreeDB, but perhaps more unique to further prevent duplicate ids in the database. (if that's possible).

Let's say that iTunes jumps on board and creates a duplicate service.  The new software would read the data from your inserted disk, send the generated ID from the read CD to the server.  The server would lookup the ID in the database and start the download of the tracks from that CD (in a non-DRM file format of course).

So, no plan is fool proof.  I guess someone could circumvent the system by creating blank wav files in the correct lengths of all the songs on the CD they want for free, burning those blank files to a disk, and then loading the disk with the program to see if it generates the right ID and hopefully download the tracks… yeah, that sounds like a lot of work.  

I think my idea is pretty good, especially for those technologically impaired folks who bought an iPod, but can't figure out how to rip the files into the correct format.

Bonus points for someone who figures out how to do it with DVDs!