What are My Options for Ripping My CD Collection ?

Especially as, like me, you’re not a tech person and a Zen Mk3 would be a streamer upgrade along with allowing you to easily rip all your CDs and have all your music in one place I’d just do that and be done.  Life’s too short to deal with tech BS, and some things are just worth paying for IMHO.  Plus you get Innuos’ wonderful Sense app as an added bonus, and you may find with the Zen your streaming sounds good enough to not need to rip the CDs that are available to stream.  Just my $0.02 FWIW, and best of luck. 

I used a service = https://dmp3digital.com/

They will rip to anything you want and in any format. For my time/effort of my 600+ CDs = worth it. Their service also came with a complete catalog of my music & they cleaned any disc that was difficult to rip. I bought two Samsung 870 EVO 4TB SSD SATA 2.5” drives, as these were compatible with my Aurender N20. Lesson learned = format the drives first using the Aurender beforehand.

Comparing the same tracts via CD, SACD, ripped storage, streaming, all analog on my turntable, and even U-Tube music is an interesting exercise...for me & in my system it really comes down to the quality of the original recording. A bad recording and poor studio mix – sounds subpar in any format. Even on You-tube there are some great & well-made tracts  = the two Steve Windwood acoustic tracts released 3 yrs ago are great examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoSn2Y-b6wI&list=RDeoSn2Y-b6wI&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXDcPoeIx-E

I ripped 500 plus during covid. I bought a fast cd player for my macbook air.  Cut ripping time by more than half over Apple’s basic unit.  Well worth the money. 

I ripped 500 plus during covid. I bought a fast cd player for my macbook air.  Cut ripping time by more than half over Apple’s basic unit.  Well worth the money. 

I ripped my collection of 4000+ CDs using dB Poweramp on Windows. The program is also available for Mac. Here is why I did it this way:

• I use a high end DAP when I travel or when I listen to music when I go to bed. I wanted the files to be available when and where there is no internet.
• I will keep my CDs until I die. When I'm using my main system I prefer physical media. Call me a Troglodyte.
• dB Poweramp gives you the option of ripping to uncompressed FLAC. This is the best file format you can have because there is no compression. If I was going to spend the hundreds of hours ripping my CDs I never wanted to feel like I ripped them in a compromised format.
• If you use an external drive like a Plextor in an outboard case that can rip at very high speed it cuts your ripping time by 70% or more. It took me three years to rip my collection even using a high speed drive.
• dB Poweramp automatically fetches the meta data and puts everything together in the music folder for each album. It also checks for an accurate rip by comparing your rip against its database.
• The program also lets you add data such as categories so you can group your music if you prefer.
• You can set up your computer and drive on a small table next to your listening chair and rip CDs while listening to your system.

If you are going to get rid of your CDs after you rip them then the only reason you would need the files is if you expect to listen to them offline. Otherwise I'm not sure it would be worth the trouble.