Has anyone ripped all their CDs to a hard drive?

Most of the songs I like on the CDs I have also reside in my i-Tunes library, as well as on "cherry-picked compilation" CDs I've burned which contain various artists work within a genre.

Also digitized many songs off LPs before i-Tunes stopped playing nice with the digitizing hardware/software I have.

I'd prefer to play the actual CD. That said, I use Spotify and Pandora extensively so I have no issue with streaming. I just won't waste my life ripping music from one format to another. If I'm too lazy to find a CD, I'll punch it up on Spotify.

It's the opportunity to preserve the original CD quality which interests me most, plus the benefits of accessing and organising the whole library in one place. I'm not familiar with EAC, but the Brennan B2 (linked in my post above) offers MP3, FLAC or WAV (which I think is also an exact copy of the CD). I imagine other dedicated rippers with storage do similar tricks.

Yep and backed up to an external drive

Thanks for the replies. I could certainly load and store CD audio files on my laptop with the right software and an external CD drive, but that's the easier part. I also want a neat playback process.To play back from laptop storage, as I understand it, I'd need a good external DAC connected to speakers or headphones. But I'd rather integrate everything with my hifi, hence my interest in a dedicated device which can be a combined CD player, ripper and hard disk storage, which can access album art and track listings automatically and put everything into a searchable database to manage playback from a phone or tablet. It might be more expensive, but it appeals to me and (or maybe because) I can understand it. I may be missing something, not knowing too much about the pc options. I've recently put a few files from the laptop onto a usb stick and played them direct into the hifi, which was fine, but I'm not sure if it could cope with a bigger external hard drive containing hundreds of CDs, or if there would be an easy way to manage that content.

Sorry, this is new to me - how do you select tracks, make playlists...etc from a streamer? I'm used to the Spotify app and another for Marantz hifi when I'm using USB. I guess that ought to work with a bigger storage device, though it's already a bit slow with a USB stick.

I never take out my CDs anymore, I stream everything. But I’ll still buy some CDs of certain bands to keep my collection “complete”.

I have about 300 CDs and definitely do not have the time or desire to put them on a hard drive when Amazon Music has already done the work for me.

Rather than ripping entire CD's, I download the songs I like via iTunes and put them on my iPhone. I have about 6 days of music on it and I typically just play them on shuffle.

I haven’t copied everything to digital, probably 80% or better. I started this years ago for the majority of my CDs, most of the more recent stuff has been CDs I’ve purchased from musicians at their gigs, if I like the band I’ll do buy it as a show of support and appreciation.

I was listening to my ancient iPod today and came across some studio and rehearsal recording of my previous bands. It’s possible that I have the hard copies somewhere, maybe. I lost a lot of stuff in Hurricane Andrew. There is software out there that will move files from iPods to the Mac but I’m not sure which publisher to go with. I don’t have the patience for complicated software now a days, stupid simple is becoming more my style.

Following advice here, I've begun to experiment with the free Exact Audio Copy software. It clearly offers a lot, but will take a while to get used to. I missed something on the first CD rip - my fault - and had to enter track names manually. The second attempt was fine and even picked up the album cover art. The rips each took about 20 minutes to get the FLAC files onto my laptop and then I put them on a USB stick as I'm still thinking about longer term options for storage and replay at the hifi end. The stick works, I can select artists, albums and tracks in the Marantz app (which is not the greatest) and the hifi screen confirms we're at CD audio quality. But, for convenience, I'm still tempted, maybe less so now, by an all in one CD player/ripper/hard drive storage box connected direct to the hifi.

Thanks LesTele. Like you, I've never actually met anyone with a Brennan B2 and I also see a lot of tech issues in their online forum. But I'm not sure if that's about design flaws or simply a company that values and responds to customer engagement and is committed to continuous improvement.

Back here, I've now found that EAC has stopped working, even after I reinstalled it twice, so I now have a free trial version (21 days) of the dBpoweramp software, another Moe's recommendation, and it seems much simpler and quicker than EAC. It's just ripped Brothers in Arms with no issues, at CD quality using FLAC, including listing all the tracks and finding the album cover art, all in half the time of EAC. It's now busy with a Jeff Beck album. So...I guess ripping on the laptop might not be a problem, if I can make a decision on storage and replay options.

Did it several years ago for my 400+ CDs using a PC with Nero to rip to iTunes. Somewhat sadly I shortly thereafter discovered Pandora an then Spotify and haven't listened to any of them in maybe five years or more.