Your easiest solution would probably be to have one computer for just being used as a server for the music. Or perhaps just install a very large hard-drive or two in your best computer and use that. I have found the best program for ripping cd's is called Cdex (just google it), It will rip your entire cd at whatever bitrate you want and will access the CDDB database to get the track info. I dont think you can get covers and stuff from there but it might be possible. You could use the seperate computers running on the network to play music if you wanted to listen from that particular computer by having your music drive shared on the network and then all the other computers can acess the music.
The squeezebox would be a great choice for if you just want to listen through your stereo. A home network is pretty easy to setup once you get the concept down. There are plenty of online tutorials on doing it as well.
