Best Way to Upgrade Digital

Ripping as you go with a PC is the easiest way to organize and tag. Whatever method you decide on is best for you.  The only way that the files will sound "better" than the CDs is if you have a crappy CDP.
But the difference is not critical and maybe barely noticeable.

Sell the Node and buy a Vault and just load all your CDs into that.  Then, when you can, upgrade your DAC and you should be in good shape.  Best of luck. 

For low-cost CD ripping: there's a free program called "Exact Audio Copy" to rip your CDs using a Windows PC. Very important to use care with the program settings to get the best resolution with the ripped files.

A step up from this is JRiver Media Center software, which has an easy-to- use CD ripper. JRiver starts at around $60 and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It works well to maintain and play a digital music library, and it has video capability.
Down side for both is the time involved to rip 3,000+ CDs. A good project for a Covid-19 lockdown...

I ripped my collection of 4000+ CDs and before I started I did some research about the best way to do it. I had an ASUS gaming laptop that I set up next to my listening chair and I used dBpoweramp for the ripping. If you rip to FLAC it will retrieve the meta data for each CD and automatically put it with the music files. It also has a feature that will detect a HDCD and rip it at 20 bits (you have to activate this feature).

The most important thing, however, is that I bought a Plextor Plexwriter PX-891SAF burner along with a high quality external case to hook up to my ASUS using a USB3 cable. This writer is well known to be much faster than a built-in burner in a server or a standard CD burner. In my case it is at least 4 to 5 times faster than the built-in CD burner in my ASUS. If you've got several thousand CDs to rip, speed is really important. I ripped the files to an external USB3 4 TB hard drive. For safety I have backed up my files to two other external drives.

My setup allowed me to listen to music and rip a dozen or more CDs per session. It took me nearly 3 years to get the whole job done but it was a good way to do it. You definitely don't want to be getting up and down to load every CD into the burner.