Using Murfie (streaming Service) to Sync your record collection 

What is Murfie?

If asked to name the most popular streaming service, I am sure most people would say Pandora. I would guess most people that like to listen to music have heard of Pandora, Rhapsody and maybe even Spotify. These services are great because they allow you to listen to music on the go or at home without having to have the physical media, but what if you don’t want to start collecting music from scratch? What if you want to digitize your existing music collection?

There is a new type of streaming service that allows you the same level of convenience while also giving you access to your personal music collection in a high-quality format: Murfie. Send your CDs to Murfie, and they will upload your music collection so you have access to it from all of your media devices. This service alone will save you hours upon hours of time digitizing your music collection. Then, they will give you access to your digitized music library so you can access it anytime, anywhere, and with exceptional sound quality. This optimal quality is achieved by offering high quality FLAC files (keep reading to learn more about sound quality).

The other great thing about Murfie is that you can purchase CD’s at a fraction of the cost of iTunes music. Purchased CDs become available to you immediately on the app and can either be stored at Murfie or shipped to you. This is a great way to grow your music collection without sacrificing the convenience of digital music sound quality of physical media.

Murfie Sound Quality

All of the popular streaming music services allow/provide a different level of quality. With Pandora’s paid service you get 192kbps, and with their free service, you’ll reach about 128kbps. That’s not a gigantic difference, but you can hear it on decent equipment. Rhapsody is kind of unclear on details, but it streams between 128 and 192kbps, and Spotify offers 96, 160 and 320kbps options. Murfie, on the other hand, is different. With Murfie’s Hi-Fi service through Sonos, you can stream High Quality FLAC files, even right from your phone (FLAC lossless streaming is planned for more streaming devices in the future). All other Murfie streaming is at 320kbps, which is still a dramatic improvement over almost all of its competitors.

Here’s an example of how a digitizing your music collection using sub-optimal setting can have a huge impact on sound quality. I have a 192kbps MP3 of “Rush – A Farewell to Kings” and it takes up 8,453kb on the hard drive. The exact same file down loaded from Murfie in a FLAC format is 35,981kb. That’s over 4 times the size! What is missing in the smaller file is the space between the instruments and the details of every sound in the recording. You can hear it if you listen. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it is subtle, but it always has an impact on the song.

I must confess to re-ripping my entire CD collection after hearing an incredible difference on two separate occasions. One was in my car hearing the same song back to back, MP3 vs. FLAC and hearing guitar sounds and space I had never heard before in that particular Zac Brown song. The other was a relaxing summer Sunday spent floating around in circles in my pool. I was listening to a favorite late 70’s rock band (UFO) and could not believe all the music I was hearing but had not heard before, just by changing to FLAC over a 320kbps MP3 file.

What all that means to you is this: say you travel, with Murfie you could now listen to all your songs using the Murfie app at 320kbps. Using the Murfie app and getting 320kbps for now, (better/higher is on the way) is going to sound better than the 128-192kbps alternatives you get with the overly compressed subpar services. Instead, you would get high quality. With Murfie you can now take your entire collection on the road with you without sacrificing quality. You can also have that same collection in multiple households and on multiple devices without sacrificing quality. I use Murfie on Sonos when at home and on my smartphone when traveling or in the car.

How to get started with Murfie

To get your whole collection stored we send the CD’s off to Murfie. They rip them, put them up on your account that you will sign up for. If you are a Sonos user, we have Murfie send us a hard drive back with the entire collection on it. We then link this to your Sonos player by putting the files on an NAS drive. If you aren’t using Sonos, we simply set you up with the Murfie app, and you are ready to listen to your digitized music collection.

If you are one of our customers, or a music enthusiast that wants to learn more about this awesome service, please contact us and we’ll give you all the details. It’s a service I am really excited about. For years clients have asked us how to digitize music collections. We couldn’t write the CD’s for them because our time would just get too expensive. Usually we would suggest getting a kid next store to do it for a few bucks but it seemed that that never actually happened. With Murfie it’s easy, the results are great, and it is cost effective.

You can learn more about Murfie here.