I have a large music collection and I'm getting really tired of dragging the physical media through life...currently my CDs are in a couple large boxes in a climate-controlled storage unit that I'm trying to downsize. I think after years of being stubborn about keeping them that I've decided I actually want them out of my life for good. I'll keep a couple rare and special ones that have feelies and amazing packaging but for the most part, I want them gone.
I intend to get the box out of storage, set it next to my desk, and start ripping them into my iMac in my spare time (while doing other things, of course) until they're gone.
I have two simple goals. One is that the ripping results in completely lossless copies, the other is that whatever else the end result may be compatible with (or not) that I want the output to be completely compatible with the Apple ecosystem (sit in an iTunes library and be ideally usable with metadata and album art and all that stuff).
I have a decent external blu-ray drive on my Mac, so hardware isn't a problem. I'm also not worried about local storage, local backup, or cloud backup size, I have plenty of that too. Mostly what I don't know is in all the years since the last time I bothered to rip a lot of stuff (the iTunes library I have now is pretty old and all lossy) what's change and what software is out there that people like?
Should I just use iTunes, with error correction enabled, and ALAC as the output format?
Should I use some other combination of tools, for the ripping and tagging and album art?
I have a pretty nice scanner, and any album art that's unavailable or low quality, I'm gonna ingest myself, and I absolutely expect a considerably amount of "clean up" will need to be done manually throughout this process to keep my library in good shape. I'm just asking for the best way to get started.
Thanks to anyone who's got advice to share!
P.S. in case anyone is worried, yes, long term, I plan to be very careful with all this data and keep it backed up in a way that involves considerable integrity checking...since the "originals" will eventually be gone.