I rip my CDs to my NAS with my Melco Optical Device. I keep the CDs and still play them. The Melco is very finicky and won’t rip a CD unless it is apparently pristine, even when the same CD will play in all my various players without issue.
Also I have been buying many big box CD reissues. Many of the individual discs are so tightly enclosed in their sleeves that in order to extracted for their initial playing without destroying the sleeves it’s difficult not to scuff the CD.
The upshot of this is that I have had to clean a lot of CDs the past few years. I laid out my preferred cleaners in an earlier post on this thread
Detergent based cleaners are bad news. After applying them both the Melco Optical device and my actual CD players won’t accept the disc until I’ve soaked the disc in warm water for some minutes to remove the gunk. And detergents are unnecessary when something like isopropyl works so well. I also find it interesting that some individuals advocate don’t do anything to a CD unless it’s really in bad shape then advocate using an unnecessarily aggressive and potentially deleterious cleaning method. It’s the proverbial kill a fly with a hand grenade when a fly swatter will do.

