Archiving CDs to HD...suggestions?

I have very limited knowledge about this, but I'll put in my two cents for a couple of your questions.

1) & 6) It is my understanding that CD players have some level of error correction that is used when playing music. Essentially, this is the what keeps things from skipping during a shock event. I believe that this applies to rips using certain software, but there is software that yields a bit for bit perfect rip. I'm not sure if it handles it as data rather than audio.

Assuming that you have software that always results in bit for bit perfection then vibrations, power conditioning and other audiophile concerns would not apply. If you're using software that can result in some error corrections, then I'd suspect that large vibrations would have a negative impact, but not much else.

The drive you rip from does not really matter.

Use EAC for a bit perfect extraction and watch the log for errors. I use the test and copy mode. The Accurip database will tell you if your rip matches others. The higher the match the more you can be certain it is bit perfect.

Rip your CDs to either wav files or flac. Personally I compress my files to flac. I also create a cue and sfv file. With 3000 CDs you want to do this right the first time. I personally do not like AAC files.

You can have files on more than one drive. I create 2% par files in case a file becomes corrupt. I also use an online backup service. I also have a few thousand CDs.

1) does the cd drive matter to the rip? or do i just need to use a good software like EAC or the like to ensure an accurate rip?

EAC will ensure the data you rip matches what was originally on the disc. However, I believe EAC is Windows-only. The only OSX equivalent I know of is called "Max". However, I haven't used it, so I cannot vouch for it. Also, the drive doesn't matter per se, as most recent drives will rip at many multiples of the normal CD speed. However, ripping 3000 discs will put a lot of wear and tear on the drive, so you may want one that you can easily replace if the first one dies. I have a Mac Mini as my primary computer and used it to rip about 1000 discs. However, if the drive died I would have been hard pressed to replace it without bringing it to an Apple retailer for service. On a desktop PC, I could have replaced the drive in 15 minutes for US$20.

2) if i rip on a PC, do i have to use a PC in the future, or can i use a Mac against my external music store if it was created under a PC?

You can rip on a PC and play the songs on a Mac, assuming you rip the songs into a format the Mac understands. AppleLossless and FLAC will both work on a Mac, although iTunes works much better with Applelossless (you can get iTunes to play FLAC, but it's a pain).

3) what sort of redundancy is in order? RAID 1? RAID 5? or just another HD the same as the one i plan on playing from, and simply use it as a backup?

After I ripped our discs, I just copied the files to two other external hard drives. One of them stays at our house and gets updated with new music and the other is stored at my parents house. It took a long time to rip all of those discs. If something terrible should happen (fire, burglary), the off-site drive will let me recover that music. It took some time to copy all of that data to the second drive, but the peace of mind was definitely worth the modest time and cost.

4) which uncompressed file format should i use? AAC or something else?

Per Wikipedia

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.

If you want lossless, go with AppleLossless or FLAC. My recommendation is AppleLossless. You can easily convert from that to FLAC later if you want to (on a Mac you could use a program called XLD to do so, which is fast and free.)

5)any estimate of how much storage would be required for 3k CDs? or would it be feasible to split my music collection across 2 primary HDs...like A-L, M-Z...which is really asking if playback software can read across multiple drives in one virtual "library"

The simplest way to determine how big of a drive you need is to assume each CD consumes 500 megabytes of space (things originally released on LP will be less, more recent releases will probably be more.) In that case, two CDs equals one gigabyte*. Given the 3000 CDs you're looking to rip, that would mean you would need 1.5 terabytes of storage space. However, using FLAC or AppleLossless would reduce the size of each disc, and therefore mean you could get by with a smaller drive. But given that a two terabyte drive these days is around US$100, there's no reason to skimp, and the extra space will give you room to grow.

5) are rips sensitive to vibrations, power conditioning, etc?

Computers are sensitive to power fluctuations, but using EAC or a similar program will let you ensure the ripped data matches what was on the disc, so you should be OK even if your power isn't perfect.

*To the computer geeks out there, I know a gigabyte isn't 1000 megabytes, but it makes the math simpler for this exercise.

The CD drive does matter because they vary in ability to correct errors and dig info out of scratches. The best ones are the Plextor 760's and 716's. Unfortunately these are not made any more and have to be dug out of EBay etc. Newer Plextors are outsourced gubbage.

Software is important too. EAC is ok but with 3K disks you want something more capable. Take a look at dbpoweramp. This has a lot of capability. There is a batch rip util that will process several rips in parallel depending on the capability of your computer. Basically figure that you can run as many drives in parallel as you have cores.

Getting good metadata is huge, and dbpoweramp lets you set up access to commercial services and edit the data on the fly. This will also attempt to snag album art.

Also I would recommend FLAC as the target format. There is just more software that supports it. Unfortunately the one exception to that rule is Apple, which of course is always pushing their own. Which is why I gave up on them a few years ago. But that is another story.

In any case you don't lose anything converting between lossless formats later. The big thing is to rip to lossless in the first place.

The format isn't that big an issue because there is free software that can interconvert (like XLD on Mac). Just make sure it's a lossless format. I do prefer FLAC because it can take any custom tag name you want.

1T is probably enough for 3000 discs, but since 2T and even 3T drives are available now, I'd just get the biggest drive you can to allow for future growth. I use an external USB drive for backup. For ease of expansion, I use LVM (logical volume management), but that's a unix thing, I'm not sure how that translates to other operating systems. With LVM I can add another drive when I need more space, issue a few commands to add that space to my existing music library, and then it all looks like one big drive.

A few important notes on format:

I'd strongly discourage you from using WAV files for lack of metadata support which will make your life living hell if you ever have to move files around, share files, or restore from a backup. Just don't do it.

If you are using iTunes to manage your library it will NOT support FLAC in its native form. You would have to use some add-on software like Amarra or Pure Music in order to use FLAC files. Otherwise FLAC is an excellent choice as it does work with a whole lot of options in software and is cross-platform.

As has been noted already, the software that you use to rip the files initially will make a significant difference. The drive will not. Good recommendations already for EAC (PC only) or XLD. I'd add Max to the list for Mac, and I would avoid ripping in iTunes because the error correction is not great. Make sure to have the error-correction set in whatever software you choose to the most vigorous setting (in Max that would be "Full Paranoia" using CD Paranoia as error correction).

Mirrored RAID is what you want. I believe that is RAID 1. Good advice already about the drive size (2-3tb with room for expansion). I would further advise you get good raw HD units for the RAID device such as WD Black Caviar or Hitachi Ultrastar Enterprise. The components used to build those drives are superior to the cheaper drives (some from the same manufacturers) and they have a higher MTBF rating, FWIW. Any drive can fail though, so backup is absolutely a must and RAID is a great way to do it.

You might also look to ComputerAudiophile.com for further info and opinions.

Good luck

A couple of last pieces of advise. Before you start ripping discs, turn off the CD autoplay feature in your computer. If you don't, the machine will try to play each disc before your ripping software has a chance to do it's thing. Also, once you find a series of settings you want to use (level of FLAC compression, directory to which the rips should be written, etc.), verify they have not changed before each ripping session. It's extremely frustrating to have to re-rip discs because some variable was mistakenly changed. Also, if you can automate the rips, do so. Ideally all you want to have to do is insert a disc and then retrieve it after the rip is finished. The machine should do all the work in between.

I copied all my cd's to a Mac mini and they sound better than they did through my CX7eMP. My DAC is the latest QB-9. All copied in AIFF plus a hundred or so hi-rez downloads.

I have done the same. I paid my daughter a little extra summer spending money and had her rip our 400 CD's onto my Mac Pro, and spend the time making sure the itunes interface got all the album pictures right. This is then on wi fi from my office to our music room to Apple Airport Express base station, which I have connected via Toslink to my krell DAC. This hardware can be simplified further if a mac mini is used near your rig.

I select my music either with an Ipod or iPad we have around.

Because I now have our music in the computer realm discipline is used to back up my library. This is an Apple centric but it does seem to work well. This was all a very cheap solution and I am glad to get rid of the clutter of so many CD's around.

The most important things: Sound - its great. Ease of Use - Its great and is slick if you are apple centric. Another pleasant surprise is using the itunes the many 100's of itunes radio stations for exploring or background music.

The only downside I have so far is that stream is interrupted if somebody uses the microwave.