When I have seen people listing their systems lately

Thanks Map, I appreciate the prompt and thorough response.

I ran into the same situation as mapman.  I had all my CD's ripped as wav.  Due to the non-existent tagging options in WAV, I was forced to manually add each CD into the windows media player database.  Basically rip a CD, load windows media player, add the new CD folder to the library, and use the lookup to "tag" the folder as an album.  

This worked fine once my collection was ripped.  But, what I was doing is storing the data in a database that only Windows Media Player could use instead of storing the data in the music files.

One day my boot/OS drive died on me which was no big deal since my music files were on another drive.  I got a replacement drive, and re-loaded windows.  I then launched Windows Media Player and added my music folder to the library.  Instead having a thousand nice and neat albums, I had a single album with 15K songs.  When my boot drive died, I also lost the Windows Media Player database.   All the work was lost.

Yes, in the end it is best to have all "static" tags and album art embedded in the file and use a open and non-proprietary file format like FLAC rather than any vendor proprietary one. That keeps you from being setback should you choose to use something new or different to play.

It also makes life easy to restore your library from a similar backup in case the drive dies or other disaster strikes. I’ve been through that too. So many more things can go wrong or change if music and all related info is not all stored in the same file. Its best to store teh most important info that will not change much if over over time in the file ("static" tags like title, artist, album art, etc.) and then let the various software used to play pull in other supplemental information that may change over time via live web connection dynamically, things like linking to external resources like allmusic for artist bios or album reviews, lyrics, wikipedia articles or any related content that evolves grows, changes and gets better hopefully over time.

Companies like Apple Microsoft and the others all do whatever they can get away with to try to lock customers into their systems and believe me Apple in particular can get away with a lot these days. Used to be more Microsoft.

I think stand alone CD Players are mostly dead, but I don't think the Redbook CD format is dead.  I differentiate CD players from universal disc players that player SACD, CD, DVD, and Blu Ray.

My old standby player was a Rotel RCD-950.  Having an IT background, I always have more computers laying around than I need.  Back in 2009 I decided to rip a bunch of music using EAC into wav, and compare the sound quality to my CD Player.  My PC was connected to my Rotel RSX-1056 receiver with an optical digital cable, and my CD was connected with the usual analog RCA cables.

Had the same song playing on both systems and synced up.  I could barely tell any difference between the two when switching between sources.  I then brought my wife in and had her listen as I switched back in forth.  On a few different songs she thought the PC source sounded better.  At that point I ripped all my Cd's to files and have never looked back.

To this day I still buy some CD's. They are simply used to rip into FLAC, and then are put in storage out of sight.  Personally, I can never see going back to having racks of CD's in the living room, plucking a CD from the shelf, putting the disc in the player, and pressing play.  I play vinyl when I want that level of interaction.  I have purchased a few high def music files if I'm sure they were not upsampled from redbook, but I still buy lots of CD's.

About six years ago, I gained the ability to rip cds and HD tracks to a hard drive and to have these digital tracks passed onto dacs capable of playing them. For several years I retained the cd players I had, main OPPO models with mods.

As long as my music servers worked properly, there was no question that they were far superior. When they were not working, I had to revert to vinyl as I sold the cd players. I still have a universal player, but don't use it as the sound is just no good.

I really think that downloads are the wave of the future, but I do know several guys that live with streaming, but I find them unlistenable. I retain all of my many thousands of cds, as ripping is getting better. I own about 500 SACDs and have had most of them transferred to DSD rips.

In all cases where I have a cd and a DSD of a recording as well as an album, The double native DSD play back is far superior and, of course, most convenient.