On 02/02/2018 05:29 PM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
i'm looking for recommendations for how to rip them to hard drive before i decide how i will end up using them.
Various good tools and storage methods addressed, but most of your effort will be spent on tagging. I recommend using Musicbrainz as a source and avoiding the thieves who are Gracenote and their "CDDB", not to be confused with FreeDB.
What I use is Asunder to rip to flac and tag and Picard for more advanced tagging. Both are GUI tools. For naming I prefer
Music/Artist/Album/01. Artist - Track.flac
The approach I take to ripping my hundreds of CDs is to do a session of multiple discs by the same artist or some other grouping while listening to some of the ripped tracks. This gives a direct reward for some boring work.
Documentation on ripping media from disc found on the web is frequently out-of-date.