Vinyl, CD's and Digital Files Accumulated Over A Lifetime

Yes, burning CDs to a server can be a daunting task, particularly editing metadata that is wrong or not found by whatever service you use for the task.  I have a lot of classical CDs and many have no automatically populating data about the CD; it is no fun filling in 30 different tracks on an opera CD in a foreign language.  When I got my first server, I had about 3,000 CDs to load.  This took about a month of evenings.  I now have about 5,000.  You can bet I have a number of back up hard drives because I am not loading this many CDs manually again.

I keep my CDs—this means I keep the art, notes, libretti, etc.—but it is certainly the case that it is FAR easier to browse the digital files of the CDs than the CD’s themselves.  I can browse by genre, by artist, composers, etc.; I can quickly sample recordings, I can find other related recordings much more easily than squinting at the spines of my 5,000 CDs.

8 TB for 500 albums?  I have not filled 8 TB for 5,000 cds ripped to WAV files.  I know someone who went through his record collection in order to pare it down to the "essential" 15,000.