Archiving Music CD's, any input?

I'm planning to move all my music CD's to hard drives (with back-ups). I don't play actual CD's much any more (though I still need a good quality digital music player that can feed my stereo).

So, how to save the music? Compression seems smart. I'm thinking of saving it both as lossless WMA files and also FLAC as a backup. The FLAC will be save the CD as a whole to I could actually recreate the CD perfectly.

My only concern is FLAC seems of limited access, though I like the open source of it. Also, I'm going to use the program EAC, Exact Audio Copy to rip the FLAC which is another reason I plan on using FLAC.

That's my current plan. If you have any experience or expertise to share, it would be helpful.

It's like everyone left and no one turned off the lights here

They're all on POL threads.

Either that or we don't speak "WMA" or "FLAC" or "EAC, Exact Audio Copy to rip the FLAC." Do we want the FLAC to R.I.P (rest in peace) or be ripped apart (torn apart)?

One of my audiophile friends just finished archiving about 400 Music CDs to a 500 GB Portable Hard Drive. I'll ask him what methed he used.

Memory is dirt cheap anymore and songs dont really take up that much space.. I have a portable harddrive with 100 gig on it....You can get one at Walmart for about $50. Unless you have the Library of Congress on CD thats probably enough space.

The hardest part is doing 1 by 1. Some of my older CD's didn't have digital titling on them ... so copying them to disk would result in "track 01", "track 02", "track 03"....instead of the actual song names. Thats a pain.

I have a 2 terabyte external hard drive with USB 3.0 -- cost $109 on amazon. It's going to be one archive of my music and all digital pictures (I'm also digitizing all my slides).

For track names, most CD's don't use the CD Text (Sony did use it, but many don't of even current production). However, if you configure most ripping software, it will access the online databases and auto-label all those tracks.

By the way, a friend of mine believes he will be given access to 1 terabyte of archived CD's from a radio station that covers most of all the major rock, pop, and jazz since the 1950's. Rock includes all the offshoots, including punk and grunge and such. Name any group or album, it supposed to be there.

I've been playing with EAC and I have some problems with it. But in terms of ripping an entire CD to either uncompressed WAV or compressed FLAC, it works very well. It does not decompress the FLAC, which is a problem. And though it's supposed to burn CD's, it doesn't work with most drives (TEAC or Plexitor mainly, and I don't have either of those).

I'm reconsidering the compression. Lossless compression cuts the size in half. I'm thinking uncompressed, I'll need about 400 GB. I've got 2,000 GB. No reason to compress down, so maybe I'll just rip uncompressed.

I am copying mine as WMA. files straight to my Playbook with a backup to an HD.
The advantage is that I can play them all through my Home Audio system just by connecting the playbook.
Same on roadtrips - it plays through the Car sound-system.
Done 40 CD's so far and sound quality is excellent.

An update:

I wasn't happy with some of the features of EAC. I liked the way it ripped, but it wouldn't decompress or burn.

So, I downloaded foobar and imgburn.

Foobar is really nice. It will play, using a CUE, the songs of a CD archived, compressed FLAC file. It will also individually decompress the songs -- so I could use foobar to rebuild lost songs.

imgburn will take a CUE file and burn a whole CD from it. So, once I've ripped my CD's, imgburn COULD turn them back into CD's if I wanted. The plan is not to have to do this, but one never knows. I like to have a trail home if something goes wrong.

I'm not just archiving my CD's. I'm planning on getting rid of all the CD's once I've ripped them. Just as I'm going to discard all my photographic slides once I've digitized those.

One of the nice things about EAC is it will rip a CD as a whole -- not as individual songs and create a CUE file to index it. This way you have the original CD intact. And the CD is only two files (the FLAC and the CUE). You don't have a dozen files for every CD. It'll make management much easier.