The PS needs to be a specific model which has not had its firmware updated. Probably easier to find one of the correct BluRay players, you’ll find them used on eBay quite often.
I’m London, UK based. If you need any help feel free to PM me.
I second Martin’s dbPowerAmp recommendation! It just works!
About 6 years ago, I used dbpoweramp to rip my circa 800 cds and stored on SSD linked to my NUC and since doing have purely subscribed to Tidal and flirted with Qobuz using Soundiz to transfer over my library. Roon finds all my ripped CDs easily and presents Tidal versions of most of them. The Tidal versions are invariably remastered and sound better than my ripped ones so in effect Tidal over the years has become my primary listening source. Yes I have some ripped CDs with tracks not in Tidal so in hindsight only those CDs I need have bothered to rip. Streaming all the way for me now but still rip the odd CD picked up now and then.
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Fyi, you can run more than one instance of Dbpoweramp. When I was ripping my collection, I had two optical drives and two instances of DBpoweramp launched, ripping two at a time is twice as fast.
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I like collecting music on CDs to use with Roon and Roon Arc. I download CDs to network storage using a NAIM UnitiCore. Really great unit that also networks throughout our home.
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That’s a quite good scenario but not in case of fire and a total loss of all at your site. Hoping these things will never happen…
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+1 for EAC here as well. Slow, but accurate.
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I 3rd his recommendation. DbPowerAmp is brilliant.
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dBpoweramp is pretty good. XLD is better. I have been running both of these side-by-side for many years. I have run across many CDs that dBpoweramp couldn’t rip that worked just fine on XLD. The inverse has been very rare. It can also do things like mounting a folder as a disc or verifying rips against the Accuraterip database. Setup is also much easier.
When I have a Mac, I run XLD.
When I don’t have a Mac, I buy one so I can run XLD.
It’s that much better.
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I don’t know XLD - but if/when I encounter a roadblock with dbPoweramp I’ll now know where to look. 
I’ve just started something similar. I had thought using a naim uniti core would simplify the ripping, but it was a bit buggy and the pc approach did allow more flexibility with tags, especially with music that internet databases don’t recognise. I had thought of using a NAS for music storing but was concerned about noise, so have gone for the SSD with online backup.
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My experience to rip CDs is similar to other Mac users before, but not exactly the same:
- Rip CD with XLD to Flac or Alac, configured to build an easy to browse, consistent folder structure (Album artist/Album title/Disc number-Track number Track title: %A/%T/%D-%n %t)
- Use MusicBrainz Picard for the additional metadata that XLD doesn’t set on its own
- Backup everything to external drive with Time Machine and to a cloud service
- Use rsync to sync the local folder to an SSD drive attached to a Mac Mini M1, which is always on and runs the Roon Core without GUI.
Side note, I don’t see the point of using more than double the disk space with AIFF. The Flac or Alac sound data, after being uncompressed by the codec in memory, will be exactly identical, bit by bit, to the WAV/AIFF one. Those are the specifications of the format, but to be sure I’ve tried myself, converting files without metadata from WAV to FLAC and then back from FLAC to WAV. The second WAV file was identical to the first one, same hash, exactly the same data.
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I have around 150’000 tracks in my collection.
I rip with dbPoweramp batch ripper, using three drivers on my workstation. This allows me to rip three times as many discs at once and do the metadata grooming afterwards.
I rip to and keep a “working copy” of my library on a RAID0 array on my workstation. This allows me to do quick changes of metadata. For small edits of metadata I use mp3Tag, for bulk editing I use jRiver. jRiver has almost unlimited possibilities (e.g. to change all instances of “Johann Sebastian Bach” in the library to “Bach, Johann Sebastian”), but the learning curve is steep.
My playing copy for Roon is on my Synology NAS. I update from the RAID0 array to the NAS using ViceVersa (which probably uses rsync inside).
Roon ROCK scans for changes on the NAS around every hour. It is easy to go to Settings / Storage in the Roon GUI and scan the NAS folder(s) manually after some metadata changes.
As backup I keep a copy of the music library on a NAS in another location.
One thing to consider is file and folder naming. I name Artists “Lennon, John” and not “John Lennon”, to make searching in Windows easier (if I want to copy some files to an external USB Stick or Harddrive). So, think about your file / folder structure naming beforehand.
I built my library three times. For the past 8 years I have not had to touch the structure any more, as it suits my needs.
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While file and folder naming is important, it should just be noted that using the “Last name, First Name” convention is explicitly not recommended for Roon - it is not best practice.
And if I want to copy files to an external USB Stick or drive, I use the Export function, which has the additional function of Roon creating file and folder names using the “Artist”/“Album”/“Track Title” convention and inserting basic metadata into the copied files if necessary.
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Thanks for clarifying @Geoff_Coupe
But that File Tag Best Practice link is about file tags, not the folders. Can’t see anything that it’s not recommended for folders (and I do artist folders as Last Name, First Name and no issues for me at least)
That is a special case for recognizing multidisk sets and says that folders like “Artist (First Name Last Name) - Album name” work. It’s not talking about “Artist/Album” in nested folders at all. “Artist (First Name Last Name) - Album name” is surely not required and nested Artist/Album/Disk folders work as most people seem to use that (either with First Last or Last, First).
For file tags, it’s clear how Last Name, First Name confuses Roon’s database matching, but I don’t think it looks at folder names at all except for multidisk identification (and for that it seems to matter that the individual tracks disks are unambiguously associated with an album folder like Album/Disk#/Tracks or Album/Tracks, and not doing Album - Disk1 and Album - Disk2 on the same level)
I’m not disagreeing. My original comment was focused on the file naming convention. The OP stated “One thing to consider is file and folder naming” and since you raised the topic of folder naming, I pointed out that the only consideration for this is for multi-disc sets.
Edit: and indeed, the crucial aspect is the naming convention used for metadata tags for the artists/composers, rather than file and folder names.
My experience is that I have a external harddisk connected USB 3 to my Nuc intel i5 with ROCK
It works perfectly well
I heve many Sacd ripped
So no need for a server ROON in manage correctly a library of nesr 2Tb
Do not copy the ripped disk in the internal memory of your NUC
Hope it helps