The easy way to track your music library

I year or so ago I realized that I never listen to CDs anymore.  I just don't.  It's just too easy to listen from my portable player (Sansa Fuze), phone, or computer.

That left me with a lot of CDs that were quickly becoming fairly expensive coasters.
The solution?  Digitize them.  Rip them into digital files, like flac or mp3, and store them on my computer.

Of course it's not a new idea.  I'd long ago ripped the ones I really like.  What was new, was the task of ripping the rest of them on the off chance that I'd want to listen to a song or two.

With the new task came some new challenges.  For instance, when would I do it? How would I keep track of which CD's I'd ripped? How would I store the new digital files? What would I do with the old CDs?

As usual, the process is proceeding with more hope than hacking, more error than trial (yeah, that's weird) and some success.

On the off chance that it might help someone, I'm posting the key successes:

• When to rip
• How to rip
• How to organize and keep track of ripped CDs
• Where and how to store the new digital files
• What to do with the old CDs

Each point links to the article explaining the process.  For the record, I used these applications and services:

• Sound Juicer for ripping
• Kid3 ID3 Tagger for supplemental tagging and organizing
• Open Office Calc for keep track of the digital files
• Google Docs for keep track of the digital files
• MusicBrainz for identifying and tagging the CD rips

The apps are all free and open source.  If you use Ubuntu, they either come with the OS or they're in the repositories.