I have been transferring my roughly 9k CDs into SSDs for the past 5 years. A few recommendations, from painfully learned experience:
1) Metadata as offered by the CD are a mess. There is no standard for names, year of release, name of orchestras, and who is considered the album artist. So, you can never assume that transfer the metadata as they are will create a searchable archive. As an example, Ludwig Van Beethoven is often entered as “Beethoven”, “Beethoven, Ludwig van”, “Beethoven, L” and so on.
2) Choose the digital format carefully: any MP3 is too low in quality to consider. I chose FLAC: it occupies about 1/3 of the space of the 600 megabytes of the original CD, it is a compressed but lossless format. On my Weiss server it plays better than the original CD from my Esoteric X-05.
3) Strongly consider a RAID1 configuration for your music hard drive. It will cost 2x for the same storage, however it avoids a painful loss of the patiently transferred Music and meta data.
4) The joy of a good UI to access your music archive cannot be emphasized enough. My Weiss server has an excellent UI that requires an iPad. Clear, searchable, easy to create a queue of songs, informative. It allows you to play the album enlarging its cover to fill the screen of your iPad in full. The UI of my Cambridge Server is fair: less searchable, less convenient, not great graphics.
It is not even comparable to my past experience, when my CDs were mostly organized on a wall mount. There was always the problem of finding the physical disc: with four systems in different parts of the house, sometimes I was wasting time trying to locate the CD I wished to play. Some of the CD were stacked too high or too low on the shelves to be able to read the labels at eye level: this would influence my choice sometimes, as I would reach for the CD that did not require squatting or hyperextending.
A music server is the closest thing to a telepathic connection between ideation or desire and the playing reproduced music. As such, it shortens the gap between your wish and its fulfillment. We could discuss for hours if this is good or bad. Some “audiophiles” enjoy the ceremonial acts of searching the LP, cleaning the vinyl surface (an impossible task imo) and the stylus, checking its azimuth, warming up the tubes…I enjoy to spend my finite time listening.
