What are My Options for Ripping My CD Collection ?

+1 for the NAS with drives/raid. I have over 5 TER of ripped CDs and purchased media...I'm old and been at it a while. I also have a backup drive in a fireproof safe.

@goodlistening64 

That is because your songs are not indexed correctly.

All of my songs were indexed when thy were flac files.  My Accord handled the metadata with no issues.  But the accord’s stereo took 3 seconds to start the next song.

I used JRiver’s Media Center to convert those flac files to wav files.  That fixed the 3 second delay in starting the next song.  But the metadata got tossed.

Note that I am playing all of the songs from a USB flash drive.  There is no connection to a smart phone or any on-line database to retrieve metadata.

As flac files, the metadata was part of each file, and my Accord read and displayed that metadata, including showing cover art.  I was able to search and filter by that metadata.  But once converted to wav files, all of that was lost.  But it remedied the annoying 3 second delay between songs.

Mazda at 15 GB takes about a minute or so to load on start-up.

I have approximately 200 GB of wav files on my USB flash drive.

I can start playing music from my USB flash drive in approximately 30 seconds.  However, the first time that I plugged it in, it took a while to read through all of the files (for what, I do not know).  But as long as I leave that flash drive connected, it does not perform / repeat that lengthy process.

Metadata is lost during FLAC to WAV conversion primarily because FLAC uses a modern, standardized tagging system (Vorbis comments) while WAV relies on older, less consistent structures (RIFF INFO chunks or ID3 tags). Many converters fail to map the extensive FLAC tags to the limited WAV structure, or the converter defaults to stripping them, focusing only on audio data

Im not familiar with JRiver, I just use plain old vanilla Media Center. You can restore that metadata information manually, I assume, but I am not an Apple guy either. 

I am surprised that your car reads 200GB, I thought cars max out at 30GB but I guess not. Perhaps car manufacturer specific. 

Yeah, I use USB storage to play, I do not dongle a player. I meant to say Ford Maverick (last year model), not Chevy, does not include the means to play the files from USB, and I assume will require an external player to do so, but that I cannot confirm. It was the first model car that I drove that I noticed the change/migrations from USB type A to USB type C. The new Maverick has one of each (A &C), but USB A does not recognize or play music. 

And to be clear, I do not see data that contends the music is playing at 192/24 (although I have not really searched for it) but judging from the sound, it is definitely hi-resolution sound. I drive older Chevy's a lot (3-5 years old) and while they play music and have fairly good players/choices, the sound is probably not 192/24 but a lower 48 or 96 resolution. 

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful comments.  I had no idea there were this many options. Many of which I'd not heard of.  I will study the suggestions and come back later with my decision.  Any other thoughts or comments appreciated.

Honestly, an external MAC DVD drive, a 1TB USB drive and iTunes, and you’re good to go.  Use the Apple lossless codec.  It’s easy, fast, and since iTunes uses Gracenote for metadata, you’ll get pretty accurate tagging without any fuss.