I have now got rid of all my CDs. That means the physical media, not the music on it. All music is carefully ripped and stored as audio files on my network storage server.
To rip my music I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC), a freeware recommended by most enthusiasts because of it’s robustness and accurate ripping. For compression I use the lossless FLAC format which gives me a compression ratio of about 50%. I decided to rip and store in full CD quality (44.1 kHz 16 bit) to make sure this is the last time I do it and don’t have to do it all over again when new codecs appear. By ripping and storing in a lossless format I can at any time compress in MP3 or other lossy formats.
After spending every evening in three months ripping CDs I of course have made a full back-up of everything. All music files are duplicated on two 500 GB Lacie Porsche disks using Microsoft SyncToy to do the actual back-up. SyncToy is a free “toy” from Microsoft, although nothing is free from Microsoft since you need Ms Windows to run it.
See my followup to this article; the paradox