Now... do it right. A couple of hours of research and testing before you begin can make a huge difference and can save you from wanting to repeat this exercise again in a couple of years.
(1)
First, make sure you have enough hard drive space. Hard drives are inexpensive, so there's no excuse for running out of space in the middle of your project and scrambling to shuffle everything around as you're ripping a large collection. Easiest is to keep a dedicated hard drive for just your CD collection in FLAC. Figure about 1/3 of a GB per CD, or around 2800 albums per 1TB of drive space (931GB of actual capacity on a 1TB drive). Could be more or less, depending on the vintage of the recordings and the material; my library averages 0.315 GB per album.
(2)
Before you begin, have a rock solid backup solution in place and know exactly how to use it. The easiest thing is to just use external USB or eSATA hard drives of the same size as your music library hard drives and mirror the main drive(s) to the backup drives. When you first rip your library you may be adding many new albums per day, so backup your work often, ideally each day. After you complete the job you may only add a couple of new CDs each month and monthly backups may make more sense. There have been other discussions on good backup/mirroring software, so do a search in the forum or ask some questions. Consider going one step further and having
two backups, with one copy kept in a different location, such as at work or a friend's house.
(3)
Select a good _secure_ ripping program. Offhand, I can think of four to recommend:
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) has been the standard for many years, but it can be difficult to set up and hard to understand all the settings. If you have the time, or you find a decent setup guide on the 'net, use it. Make sure you configure and use (and understand) AccuRip, to assure the most accurate ripping possible. EAC is free.
dbpoweramp is a newer program that has some advantages over EAC. It can be faster to rip CDs, and for a large library the time savings can be substantial. It's available in both free and pay ($38) versions, but only the paid version utilizes AccuRip, which makes ripping faster (it automatically falls back from fast extraction with AccuRip verification to slower, secure ripping when the AccuRip verification fails).
Easy Audio Copy is a new program from the author of Exact Audio Copy. It's a commercial product ($30) that greatly simplifies the secure ripping process for most people. It too uses AcccuRip and, like dbpoweramp, should automatically fall back to secure ripping, so it should prove to be very fast.
For use under Mac OS X,
XLD has become the standard for secure ripping. It also takes advantage of AccuRip.
(4)
Download and install a good tagging program. For Windows,
Mp3tag is highly recommended. You will use it to fix and/or add metadata (tagging) to files after you've ripped them. Even if you have no need to add new tags, you'll be discovering small typos in the data for years and will need a way to edit it. You'll soon find Mp3tag to be invaluable.
(5)
This can be the most time-consuming part of the preparation process. Design a workflow for ripping each CD that suits you and that will help speed up the process. I recommend taking one CD and ripping it five, ten, twenty ... as many times as you need until you get the process down pat. Then grab another CD and do the same. You may run into snags with some CDs that you didn't anticipate. And a third CD, etc.
After you have maybe five CDs ripped, load the files into your preferred playback software. Are they tagged appropriately? You may find that you want to add some tags. (Logitech Media Server, for instance can use ARTISTSORT tags for names, so "Johnny Cash" could be sorted under "Cash, Johnny"). If not, go back and refine your process.
Only when you're certain you have it down should you launch into the job of ripping hundreds or thousands of CDs. The last thing you want is to rip 100 CDs and find that you didn't do it right and want to start over.
(*)
One other recommendation. Most (maybe all) of the ripping programs above have a means of downloading cover artwork for your CDs. You can often find much higher quality artwork at
Album Art Exchange, but you'll have to search for it and download it manually. IMO, it's well worth the effort. What I do as part of my standard ripping procedure is to go out and download high quality cover art while the CD is being ripped. If I can't fine one, I scan the artwork that comes with the original CD.
