What are My Options for Ripping My CD Collection ?

@cleeds 

I was referring to the fact that those programs cost money or they don't. If they are "free", you will have to read the fine print to understand why, but there is nothing in life for free.

Sales fluff refers to the persuasion to the prospective customer that you need the product when, in reality, you do not. Kind of like a pop-up blocker or virus protection- the fear is worse than the product and they know that so they lead with the fallacy that you have a problem, when they are the ones who are creating the problem. Similar to children.

Metadata album/thumbnails photos change the most. If your local database does not include a photo of the artist playing, an online database will download one. I put my music on a portable device, the rest is done for me. It's what metadata was meant to do, fill in the blanks.

I was referring to the fact that those programs cost money or they don't. If they are "free", you will have to read the fine print to understand why, but there is nothing in life for free.

Nonsense.

If you have a drive its easy enough to rip your CDs to Lossless files and stream through just about any streamer on the market.  Just find any software package, Sourceforge, dbpower amp and may others .  As long as you rip to lossless say FLAC files you are set to do what you want later on.  I have ripped my thousands of cds a few times just because I wanted to do them over as I had a mix of FLAC WMA and WAV lossless the first time.  Now they are all stored on a NAS streamed through my various systems if wanted or just  played in my office 

Take your time do it while you are doing other things.  Rip move in Rip, move on etc... its is very easy to do no real knowledge required once you get it set to go. 

I use a $50 LG Blu-ray CD-R player to rip my CDs, and JRiver software (inexpensive IMO for lifetime upgrades) on my PC. The JRiver does a great job for what I need. But honestly, I don't really listen to much of my digital library. I either stream via Qobuz or play the CDs.  Every CD or vinyl copy that I buy from Bandcamp usually comes with a digital copy that I use for backup. I'm only ripping CDs these days to act as digital backups, as well as having a copy of most of my library on my laptop. That is handy when I travel & want to listen to music off-line.

In the event the internet comes crashing down thanks to our soon-to-be AI overlords, I'll be able to listen to everything I enjoy without relying on wifi. 

@goodlistening64 

The zip file analogy you used is similar but not exact.

My analogy was meant for the absence of losing any bits, with file formats that are lossless.  Even with compression, no bits are lost.  But, yes, how a compressed (or zipped) file is handled by the software will differ in terms of multitasking, which would stress out low-end equipment.

My 2020 Honda Accord is an example.  It plays flac files with no problem.  But it takes 3 seconds to proceed to the next song.  That drove me crazy.  If I wanted to skip ahead several songs, it took half of forever.

With the wav format, there is no delay for me skipping songs.

So I converted all of my flac files to wav files, and use those wav files in my car (still keeping my flac files for everywhere else).

But now, in my car, I cannot search by artist, etc.  Due to wav having lousy metadata capacity, searching or filtering in my car is useless.  The car's display does not even show me the name of the artist.  It often shows "Various Artists", because that is the directory where many songs are, due to purchasing, for example, a One Hit Wonders compilation.  When the songs were flac files, it showed me the artist.

So use flac (or alac for Apple hardware), and use wav if your hardware sucks like my Accord's head unit.

By the way, if anyone has a similar Accord model (and this might be true for any Honda vehicles?), there is a developers / diagnostic menu that you can bring up.  And there is a setting the improves the sound quality.  I used to get fatigued listening for 10 minutes.  But no more fatigue.  With the developers setting enabled, the listening fatigue is gone (or takes over an hour before feeling any).

I found this video, which might be the one I saw 6 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6o0zHZt6KM

The sound quality improvement might not hit you right away.  But it is real.  And if you undo it a few weeks later, you will not like it.