Help !

Take to local Salvation Army shop, let them deal with them

Sorted!

Goodwill or the Salvation Army are good ideas. You must live in pretty small quarters though. I have about the same number of CDs, and 3/4s of them are on wall racks that hardly take up any space at all in my listening room. Are you being a little dramatic? 

@onhwy61 What is this "legal issue" you mentioned?  I think you may have gotten some bad information.  

schubert,

The easiest, most straight forward, cost effective way, that I know is the Bluesound Vault 2i. It is a single box solution, housing a streamer, hard drive and CD ripping drive built in. Just pop in a CD and it will rip it to the hard drive. Playback can be controlled from a smartphone, tablet or laptop. If you have a local dealer, stop in and give it a spin. It's a pretty elegant solution and the sound quality is pretty good.

Ripping 1500 CDs will take some time. I highly recommend you cull them and only rip the stuff you know you will listen to again. The Vault also support streaming audio, so you could also subscribe to a streaming service and stream music to you heart's content. However, the various streaming servers have different levels of content, depending on genre/type. Some services are heavy on current pop music and lighter on classical, and vice versa. If you decide you want to stream, post another question regarding the best streaming service for your listening preference.

Good luck and enjoy.....

I can see the appeal of devices like the Vault, but if you rip all your CD's to one and then dispose of the physical media, you need to make sure you back it up, otherwise if the Vault goes bad or its hard drive dies, all of your music is gone.  From what I've read, it is possible to backup to an external hard drive, however it appears the music is stored in a proprietary format:

"The ext4 storage format is the same format that the Vault uses to store your data. It will not appear on most conventional Mac and Windows PC's."

You can also use the Vault as a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device and have your files show up on your computer -  https://support1.bluesound.com/hc/en-us/articles/200387457-Backing-Up-Your-Vault

Ideally, you should have two backups of all your important files - one on-site, and one off-site in case something happens to your home and both backup copies are lost (fire, flood, theft, etc.).

I haven't ripped all of my CD's, but I've been slowly copying them all to my computer.  I use foobar2000 to rip them, it has good tools for checking accuracy and a couple of lookup databases to automagically name the files.  I copy the files to an external hard drive that is automatically backed up daily by SyncBack and I also send a copy to the cloud with my online backup.