Windows media player had moved away from its native CD ripping and playback capabilities, especially after nearly all desktop and laptop computers removed physical optical disc drives (ODD’s) from their hardware. This year, with the release of Microsoft’s Window’s 11 Build 25158, they reintroduced a feature in Media Player that used to be a staple in the past, CD ripping. This new CD ripping feature allows the user to create not only MP3 files, but also WMA, FLAC, ALAC, or the default setting AAC format. This is great news for all audiophiles that want to convert their CD’s to audio files, which they can then load to their phones or just to have all their music on a hard drive in one place.

The only problem is that even though Windows brought back its music ripping feature, todays computers typically still don’t offer default optical disc drives anymore. Therefore, in order to use the ripping feature, the user needs to purchase a drive that can work with the ripping software. Vinpower has a solution, offering a number of internal optical disc drives (ODD) to choose from, including the very popular Optiarc AD-5290S series. Take advantage of having a digital backup of all your CD’s and use the Optiarc drive for the best reliability and to capture the sound the way it was meant to be heard.

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

There’s something to be said about nostalgia, but that’s not the only thing fueling the increase in both CD sales volumes and revenues. There are those that cling to older technology because they don’t like change, or a younger generation enjoying the music of their parents or grandparents. Yet, research has shown there are other factors contributing to the CD resurgence and why it’s not just a fad, but a sustainable reality. As you can clearly see from the following link to the Recording Industry Association of America, (RIAA), https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/, sales of CD’s have increased year over year for the 1st time since 2004. So why the revitalized CD push and how does it affect you?

Firstly, with the boom of vinyl records, owning tangible music content, rather than just streaming, became cool again. However, the scarcity of vinyl and the exponentially higher price of vinyl compared to CD’s is pushing music lovers back to CD’s. Next, digital content has a clear and crisp sound that gives us what the artists truly intended us to hear when we listen. Plus, CD’s can hold more content on a single side, so there’s no flipping the disc over like an album or cassette. Then, there’s a big push of fandom to own tangible effects of their favorite artists. These keepsakes give the holder ownership of something related to the artist, much like a poster or T-Shirt.

That’s where the increase in CD sales comes back to benefit the duplicator, wholesaler, or even content creator. Touring artists, especially independent artists, make a sizeable amount of their income from merch at concerts. Some of that merch is of course the artist or bands CD’s, which is typically not included in the RIAA sales figures, so it’s an uncalculated revenue stream. However, many duplication/replication companies that make these discs for the artists have seen sizable increases in CD audio duplication/manufacturing. If you’re in the business to sell CD’s, duplicators, or accessories around these items, it shows there’s still a viable business to be had and Vinpower is your one stop shop to support you with all the media, hardware, and services you need.

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

Even though online ecommerce sales growth compared to traditional brick and mortar stores was happening before the pandemic, COVID certainly expedited the transition making huge inroads on overall sales volume. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, we’re only going to see even more inroads for online shopping, especially for unique or niche oriented items. That’s why Vinpower has been using this past year to improve and make available better digital content to represent our products to improve visibility and attractiveness to consumers. From how to videos to static images, we are constantly upgrading and improving the collateral we can offer for our expanding product lines.

As you can see from the below images and videos, we are creating simple yet captivating content that helps give consumers a better understanding and appreciation for our product lines. We are happy to offer this collateral to our reseller and distributors so that they can use them globally for their own online listings of our products. Want to show how easy a duplicator is to use, we have a video for that. Want to show a drive’s media compatibility list, we have those charts. Want to use an image to convey the uses and advantages for our media, we have images for that. We can work with our channel to help put our products in the best light to lead customers to that Buy button, whether it’s on your own e-commerce site or through a large scale national site, like Amazon.

Here are a few examples on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/Qa8-ZB_HcyE
https://youtu.be/JqsS0gM4QGI
https://youtu.be/v0IqyV2y3Io

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

For those IT professionals out there, the HDDMini is the perfect companion to backup or help save a hard drive from a persons computer. But, you don’t have to be in IT or have a lot of technical knowledge to use the HDDMini. Simply connect a master source and the number of subject drives you want to copy on to (based on the max connections of the system) and you’re good to go. The HDDMini is extremely inexpensive and will make your life much easier if you need to backup or copy any SATA connected HDD or SSD.

Why would an everyday person need one? Lets just say, most people don’t go around hammering nails on a regular basis, but yet they have a hammer on hand just in case. The HDDMini is the same scenario. What if you have a hard drive that’s failing and you want to quickly copy the content before you lose all the data? Second scenario, you bought a larger capacity hard drive and you want to move the content from the previous one to the new hard drive safely, without a lot of hassle or being very time consuming. How about, you just want to make a backup of your hard drive should anything happen to the primary one? You are constantly adding content to your hard drive, so you would need to constantly back it up. How about, you have an old hard drive that you plan to recycle and you don’t want to get rid of it with all your personal data on there, the HDDMini has a secure erase feature that will remove all content preventing anyone from being able to recover it.

I could give a longer list of reasons why everyone should have a HDDMini on hand, but you get the point. So then, why the Vinpower HDDMini? This below Youtube video link will show how easy it is to use and all the great features it has to offer. Click on the link and see for yourself:

https://youtu.be/v0IqyV2y3Io

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

Another testimonial of personal experience using the iXflash Cube. I recently took a long overdue vacation with the family in a beautiful tropical location. Like millions of other people, my iPhone doubles as my camera, especially when I’m traveling. Everyday, I’m capturing tons of photos of all the fun we’re having and the interesting sights found as we relax and take in the sights. For millions of people, that’s where the photos will remain permanently, because they don’t use any sort of backup. However, for me, this was an exiting opportunity to fully test our iXflash Cube, being that this is the 1st vacation I’ve taken since its release.

I can tell you it couldn’t have been easier to use. Every night when I went to bed, I connected my iPhone to the charger, with the iXflash Cube connected. Immediately, the iPhone began charging as normally, but at the same time, the iXflash kicked in and seamlessly began reviewing the iPhone for any new images that haven’t already been saved and backed up all the new images and videos. When I work in the morning, my iPhone was fully charged and all the pictures and videos I had taken were backed up onto the iXflash Cube. That was it, there was nothing else I needed to do. I repeated this process every night while on vacation and the same results. I didn’t have to initiate the backup or program anything, it all took place automatically.

When I returned from the trip, I simply plugged the USB connection of the iXflash Cube into my PC and all the pictures and videos I took on the my vacation were instantly viewable and I simply download them to my external hard drive, for safe keeping. Not only that, but I was able to instantly post images and video to social media or share them with other friends and family members without any issue. The iXflash Cube is so easy and useful, plus very affordable, it would be a shame to vacation without it if you’re an iPhone or iPad user.

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

If you’re in the duplication market, then you know the value of recordable optical discs that have minimal fallout rate. Not only is there a cost in terms of discarded discs, but when you get failures during production, it’s a waste of time too, which is often more valuable. When you see high fallout rates with cut-rate recordable optical discs, then you have to often stop production and try to determine when the problem is with the media or the equipment. With Optical Quantum, there’s never a doubt about the quality and reliability. So you don’t waste money or time during production, which increases your bottom line and makes everyone happy.

Check out the latest video about the value of Optical Quantum to find out for yourself:

https://youtu.be/JqsS0gM4QGI

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

When you think of all the changes in technology that’s taken place in the past 100 years, it’s staggering to think how far we’ve come, for better or worse. Depending on your age, will mark what advances had the most impact on you and what we’re nostalgic about. This came about when my wife and I were talking to our kids about what life was like when we were kids and what were staples then that my kids today know nothing about, like rotary phones, TV’s with knobs, daily newspapers, etc. As technology evolves, some products also evolve or get phased out entirely.

One item that hasn’t changes and may be up for debate whether it’s been phased out or not is the Compact Disc (CD). Even though it’s not as prevalent as it was, I still order CD’s and take my kids to those remaining record stores to buy new music. In fact, it was 40 years ago that the 1st commercial CD was made available in Japan. Billy Joel’s 1982 release of “52nd St” making history as the very first album available on CD. It would still take another year or so before the format caught on, but when it did, it was like lightning in a bottle. The superior digital sound was a hit and consumers were excited to replace their entire music library with CD’s. Vinyl and cassette tapes were ultimately phased out in favor of the CD.

Ultimately, vinyl and to some extent cassettes have made comebacks in the last 5 years for nostalgic purposes due to the unique sound quality and retro cool factor. Yet, the CD still remains and even in middle age, holding its own as the newer digital streaming and MP3’s dominate the music scene. Even though my kids are not as familiar with CD’s as they are with Spotify or other streaming services, they still recognize the value of owning music on a CD that they will always have available to them as the streaming services come and go.

If you want to make sure you always have your favorite music available when you want it, use Vinpower’s OPTODISC line of CD-R’s to keep backup copies. OPTODISC is proven to offer superior sound quality and longevity compared to the competition, so you won’t have to worry about premature degradation.

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.Vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

When you travel for vacation, most people typically want to memorialize the trip with photos and videos along the way. That was the case for my family as we traveled out of town and took lots of pictures and videos with my iPhone. Since I’m a huge advocate for backing up those irreplaceable memories, I like to download a copy of that content to store on an external source, in my case, 2 separate external hard drives that I store in separate locations. You can never be too careful and I’d be very upset if I every lost those files.

With that said, the iXflash Cube makes it so incredibly easy and convenient to back up those images and transfer them to another source or to share with friends and family members. Each day or night, I simply connect my iPhone to a regular charging cable with the iXflash Cube connected and not only is my iPhone recharged, but within minutes, all my pictures and videos are backed up. I didn’t need to do anything extra, it’s automatic. This is especially helpful with the large video files that are too big to email and too much of a hassle to upload from iTunes. Using the iXflash Cube is no different than not using it, there are no extra steps, so you almost forget you’re even using it. Every time you charge your iPhone with the same cable that’s connected to the iXflash Cube, your images and videos are securely transferred to the iXflash Cube, then you use the USB connection to easily download those files to whomever or wherever you want.

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

Video content is everywhere and we’re all creating it through our phones and tablets. Whether you’re creating video content for social media, online retail listings, entertainment, home videos, etc., if you’re creating the content to post, then frequently that content has to be transferred to a 3rd party video editing software to create the final cut. To do so, more often than not, means the user has to then find a way to download the raw video footage onto the device with the video editing software and that could be a full production in itself! Why go through the hassle when the iXflash makes it so easy?

For example, I often make videos of our products that we sell through various online retail sites, such as Amazon. In the past, I would use my iPhone to film the content, then I would need to either upload that video to the cloud and then download the file from the cloud to the computer I was using to edit with, or I would need to connect my iPhone to the computer, download the file through iTunes or another software and then upload that file again to the editing software. It’s time consuming and a hassle.

With the iXflash, I simply connect the iXflash to my iPhone, open the iXflash App and select the “CAMERA” function, and film whatever project I was working on as I ordinarily would with my iPhone camera function. When I’m done, all the content I filmed is stored directly on the iXflash drive, which I can then connect to any PC or Mac with the iXflash’s USB connection and open the video file(s) directly from whatever video editing software I want to use. There’s no waiting or concern about file compatibility. It streamlines the process and I go from shooting the video to editing right away.

If you use an iPhone or iPad to film content as a function of your job, the iXflash is the ideal time and money saver that you don’t want to be without!

To learn more about this item, or any of Vinpower’s line of products, visit www.vinpowerdigital.com, or speak with a Vinpower representative in your area.

Recently, I took my family to Universal Studios Hollywood to enjoy the movie magic and some thrilling rides. One of those rides was Transformers: The Ride 3-D. While waiting in line for the ride, low and behold, I see a familiar item. Optical Disc Drives installed in the wall as decoration for a fictional US military base used by the military and the Autobots, for protection against the evil Decepticons. Seems I should explain.

One of the great things about Universal Studios is the exceptional detail they put into creating the environments while waiting in line for all of their rides. The ride itself is only part of the experience, given that you spend 10x longer in line than the ride itself. So, while you’re in line, you’re immersed into the theme of the ride. In this case, the theme is hi-tech mechanical devices, which all of them could be harmless equipment or an actual sentient being that’s in disguise.

Since all the decorations are interactive, it was fun to watch my kids harmlessly push buttons and play with devices, like the optical disc drives, which they wouldn’t interact with at home. The ride shows me that the designers and engineers behind the ride feel optical disc drives will certainly continue to be relevant in the future, and they make awesome hi-tech decorations as well.

If you need one or many optical discs drives for your own business or personal use, visit www.Vinpowerdigital.com, or contact a Vinpower representative near you. Vinpower is the primary source for all physical optical and digital storage devices and media.