Mark, I've never heard of any one using a Tivo or Xbox for music storage, I suppose it can be done but it's not what they are designed for. Maybe I'm missing the boat? Will they decode FLAC, ACC, or WMA or other lossless formats?
If you are into good quality sound, and since you are on an Axiom board I'm assuming so, then the SB with a lossless format, like FLAC, is the best way to go. If you are just ripping to a lossy format like MP3 and aren't too concerned with quality then any player will do.
I mentioned RAID because you had written about having 100's of CD's and the Jukebox style CD player. If you are only ripping a few dozen CD's then don't worry about it. But if you are ripping hundreds, or thousands eventually then using a RAID solution makes sense. Hard drives a dirt cheap now and a couple of 500 gig drives is peanuts when compared to having to re-rip all of your CD's if you were to lose your data for what ever reason. Maybe I'm a little obsessive but I also periodically dump everything to an external drive…. I like the safety factor. Then I have things in 3 places, server, external, and original.
One other thing, tagging and the free data bases have been mentioned. And yes they can be wrong. You can either correct the information before ripping. Or go back and edit it after. This is the tool that I use.
MP3 Tag It works great. Change names, generes, titles, etc etc.
