Finally finished ripping all my CD's (about 500 of them) to my hard-drive...I also have them backed up to an external drive...any reason to keep them? What have others done in a similiar situation. Maybe take them to the local music store that buys used and get some money for them???

 

Dunno what you should do with your CDs but I would start taking your favorite tracks from each album and making Genre mix CDs. A minimum of 7 so that you can load up the car until they support MP3.

 

If the external drive is an ipod it makes sense.

On the other hand you could now start renaming them to your own liking and make another backup. Just be sure to keep the original backup in case you might want to start all over again because you realized that the bit-rate was too low because you overlooked that feature and only found that out after reading about it on some forum.
Anyway, be a proud man, you're probably one of the few people owning an entirely legal mp3 collection! Keep 'm to show off with that.

 

I have done the same and put them on a home server.
This way all our music collection is accessible anywhere in the house in digital quality.

 

If you take a look at the last few issues of PC Magazine, there's lots of info on home media centers including wireless.

You might want to keep your CD's in storage offsite as a music insurance policy (fires have been known to happen). Also, hard drives aren't forever (even with a backup). Sometimes backups become corrupt (age, magnetic disturbances, moisture, electronic failure, etc). Unless you play/test each backup file on a regular basis, you don't know for sure that each file is replayable or will remain playable.

In addition, there may be new technology later on that you may want to take advantage of.

I over 20 years dealing with corporate networks, accounting systems and data recovery.

 

buy an Ipod, or similar unit.

You can have your music portable and easily acessable.

 

share them =)