To those with Digital Libraries - Some Questions...

started initially by ripping CDs. Now purchase stuff from many websites that carry said masters.

Store them on a SATA SSD

Learned not to care about storing in .wav as it is useless mostly for metadata

Only advantages are exclusives for certain artistes on some shops

I have a Melco NAS, and purchased one of their accessory Hard Drives so my current capacity is 5TB.  I’ve ripped about 1300 CDs and have approximately 100 downloads.  I also have a few older HDs that contain many MP3’s that I don’t currently play and don’t have tethered to the system but I play them occasionally just to make sure they haven’t become corrupted.

  I rip CDs with the Melco Optical Ripper and their software.

My biggest learning curve was ripping the MP3’s as iTunes.  I had actually ripped most of them as Apple Lossless and then one day I received an email from Apple asking if they could convert them to MP3’s as a “service “ for me.  I refused but they did it anyway.  I subsequently used dbPoweramp to rip them again when I bought the NAS and eventually added the Melco optical ripper.  dbPoweramp worked well but I haven’t used it for years 

Firstly you need to decide if you want to rip downloads or physical media. You will get a better sound with physical media but it's expensive. 

Alternatively stream but the quality in my opinion is not so good, but it's convenience cannot be denied. 

Do you already have a large collection of physical media?