Ripping CD's to hard drive

@lalitk Thanks so much!

If it consummates, the "quality" of rip doesn’t matter, only the quality of playback. Ripping usually repeats until it is "right." PB only gets one shot at it. I’ve had good success with a Pioneer BD External drive.

@cjlundberg 

Anything at or above 192kbps MP3 is fine.

Below 192kbps it's fairly easy to hear sonic degradation on anything other than speech only/ simple recordings.

FLAC now seems to gradually be taking over from MP3 as the preferred file medium of storage but I can't say I hear any improvements with it.

I'll only use FLAC to rip the rarest or most important of recordings.

Giving each disc a quick cleaning wipe before ripping won't hurt either. I usually breathe on the disc first and then wipe it off using a clean cotton T shirt.

Some say that you should use 8x or 10x ripping speed and switch off error correction, but I can't say I've noticed any difference here either.

Therefore I tend to leave error correction on.

+1 for Exact Audio Copy, +1 for dbpoweramp (which can do more if you want). These two are really all you need. Almost any computer grade drive can work. This is OLD technology now. Even a $30 computer optical drive is up to the task on clean, relatively unscratched discs. Bypassing crappy Windows though is key, hence the use of those two programs noted above.

Storage is cheap these days. If you are going to all the trouble to rip your discs, at least do them in FLAC so you’ll be "one and done" and not come back next year and wish you hadn’t ripped them to a lossy format.

Some even argue that it is better to rip to wav files, but wav offers no easy way of adding metadata or easy database sorting while FLAC does. If you don’t care about making the file size smaller say using FLAC level 8 (the best), you could always rip to FLAC level 0, which has no compression at all, but retains the ability to hold metadata. I guess ALAC isn’t bad either.

Various programs can help you with importing the metadata. I use mp3tag (which despite its name, also works for FLAC and ALAC). It can often find and import the album information and cover art from various online repositories like Discogs. (Don't trust iTunes. It sucks at this and often misidentifies CDs). 

My nephew paid his then 13-year-old kid a dollar for every 10 CDs he ripped. Best bargain he ever got. The kid got wise later and wanted $30 for mowing the yard.

I chose the Innuos Zen Mk3 Streamer because I saw it as well designed 

three box solution. Streams, Rips, Stores. Had it now for 3 years and still

love it. Their CS is exceptional too. About $3,200 now I think.