Going to rip 2000 cds. Which software?

I have been doing this for years using Mac mini's. I would suggest using either XLD or MAX.
I configure the bit rate to a higher rate. I have used a few different playback software application (audirvana, pure music, others) and I prefer Audirvana 2.X with their iPad app to control playing music. I configure the ripping to store the music in AIFF format in iTunes, but I don't use the integrated iTunes mode in Audirvana. In Audirvana, I can have multiple disks/folders containing iTunes files, flac files, wav files, and Audirvana can read all of them. IMO, I think dedicated music servers are way over rated and way over priced for what they do. Remember the Sooloos system, all it was good at was displaying content. If you want something similar, check out roon. The problem with what I see with roon is that it doesn't sound as good compared to other well known playback software. Also I would stay with Macs using a Mac mini. To get better quality playback, don't hook up hard disks to your Mac mini. Purchase either a NAS device or hook these hard drives to a remote server so your music server won't have any disk drive noise or vibrations coming from these external disks nor will they compete on the same bus that connects to your external dac.

jzzmusician, I just noticed a Naim UnitiServer for sale on A-gon at $1995, just under your max I realize but everything is negotiable these days. 

The Naim UnitiServe takes about 5 minutes per ripped CD.  However, the unit referred to available here at Audiogon(great price!) is SSD which I believe will give you 512GB of storage.  Even by burning in FLAC, you would fall short of internal storage of 2,000 CDs and would to need external storage to cope, adding another piece to the puzzle.

Wow!  You guy are great.  Thank you for your help!

Right now I've got three choices:

1.  Use my MacBook Air with an external drive
2.  The Naim UnitiServe
3.  Get a streamer that runs off a nas

Number 1 is the least costly.
Number 2 is the easiest and as long as I can get a good 5 years of use I see no reason other than budget to get one.
Number 3 is attractive in that a streamer would cost less (Cambridge Audio CXN) and the music would always be on the nas

And to answer a couple of questions;

My computer is 5 years old and uses USB 2.0
My Mac uses 3.0, I think.

Whichever way I go it's going to be at least a month before I buy anything.  I just heard from Kent at Electrostatic Solutions.  I sent my Quad 2805 speakers to him for some repair.  The repair cost was very reasonable, so reasonable that I'm springing for some upgraded mods, and there goes my budget.

I'm thinking that I'll rip some cds in a casual sort of way and start messing around just using my Macbook and next month make a long term decision.

Thank you all again for your input and I certainly don't mind keeping this thread alive.

-- Bob

I would like to hear rips with the Unitiserve.

I use XLD and could never get my rips to sound anywhere near as good as CD playback.

To compound the problem, I found rips via dbpoweramp on a different Macbook sounded totally different.