Do i need a CD player, or can I use Mc Book?

gdhal I must disagree.The level of quality in todays inexpensive DACS far surpasses most inexpensive cd players & most include Analogue Out so it will act as PreAmp..For all out assault I recommend the SMSL "M8" DSD/DXD DAC,about $250.00 DELIVERED!For simple 24/96 the HiFiMeDIY "SABRE DAC2"can't be beat for UNDER $100.00 Delivered!!!
rockanroller,Archive all cd’s on Macbook,download new HiRes music & use a Streaming Service.Start out with the Free services like Pandora...MacBook>DAC>Amp...Have a look at my headphone system for ideas...

I do both, spin disks and rip onto Mac. Search the forums, several threads concerning all your questions. Many benefits to having CDs ripped to computer. One is that your music can be taken with you.

I agree completely with freedriver. Inevitably you'll want to upgrade some of the components or software in the future but there are so many  advantages to having your music accessible from a computer that the important thing is to get started. It will change the ways you listen to music, for the better.

There are some things to think about as you put it all together. Music takes a lot of disc space and most laptops don't have very large hard drives. It might not take long to fill up the drive on your MacBook, particularly if you start downloading high-res files.

Consider an external hard drive attached to the MacBook as your primary repository and keep your favorites on the MacBook drive for traveling. Hard drive memory is so cheap these days that you should buy a couple of one-terabyte external drives for starters, one as your primary and one as a mirror backup of the primary for the time when your primary fails, which it eventually will. This is really important, you don't want to have spent all those hours ripping CDs and the money spent on downloads just to have it all disappear when a drive fails. And, again, it's not a question of whether a hard drive will fail, the question is when.

Because the components in a laptop have been miniaturized to save space they are a little more prone to failure than external components and they're expensive to replace. I would suggest you get an external CD/DVD reader to do the ripping. They're cheap and a lot less expensive to replace than the internal drive on a MacBook.

sfar has spoken some very wise words.

After several reloads of my entire library I decided to to upgrade to a NAS drive thar supports dual drives in a mirrored RAID configuration.

This approach guarantees that both drives carry a copy of my library and in the event of a drive failure, I simply replace the faulty drive and the NAS drive takes care of copying data to the new drive automatically. No backups are required.

When I first built the NAS DRIVE i used a couple of spare drives from old computers. they worked very well, but I later found out that RAID really requires server quality drives.

You guessed it - one of the drives failed.

I simply popped in a new server quality drive and the system took care of everything else. I then replaced the other old drive with a second server quality drive.

The system has been running flawlessly.

I've downloaded tracks up to sample rates of 24/192 and never encountered any problem with this configuration. 

I stream via my iMac that is connected to my DAC via USB. Both the iMac and NAS drive run over an ethernet wired connection (not wireless) to maximize transfer rates.

I use iTunes for library management and Audirvana to trnafer data to the DAC

Hope that helps :

Unfortunately RAID does not protect from controller failure, virus, lightning or simply operator's mistake.  That's why I keep 2 backup copies instead.  Second copy is an additional protection from something bad happening during backup.  Also RAID does not protect from fire, theft etc. while my second backup kept at work does.  In addition, unpowered drives tend not to fail.  RAID might be a good solution, but I would still make one extra copy.  Drives are cheap these days.

Once network (Ethernet, WiFi, Async USB) is used payback program does not make any difference (unless it is making additional processing - like oversampling).  It is because data and not the music is sent (no timing) while timing is recreated on the other side of the network bridge.  At this point nothing on computer side makes any difference (program, speed, amount of RAM etc) - saves a lot of money.  You can also use computer during playback (as I do) - it won't make any difference.