I actually have about 12,000 LPs (I count double-albums etc. as one). The rest is digital, and is now the larger part of my library, either ripped from CD, tape (DAT and reel-to-reel … not much of this) or bought as downloads. A modest chunk of those 12,000 have been needle-dropped, since most of them are still in the UK (I’m bringing select albums over a bit at a time) - I think about 500 at this point.
For the CDs, I bought one of those CD-duplicating auto-loading, multi-drive, robots, wrote some software to have it rip, rather than burn, and then stuck 250-disc piles of CDs on it and let it go. In addition to using a low-level read technique (similar to EAC), my software ripped each disc once in each of three drives, compared the outputs (which rarely weren’t bit-identical), and if necessary voted out the bad data (today I’d do that with a simple checksum calculation and lookup via AccurateRip on a single rip of the disc and only re-rip if it didn’t match).
Storage was the real issue … the vinyl, using the typical “70 albums per linear foot” (including the LP itself, inner sleeve, antistatic liner and jacket), took up about 180 linear feet of shelf space. That all, along with the CDs, wound up on rolling shelving, so I only had to have space for me to get between one pair of shelves and that hugely increases the density of the storage.
Yes, storage is an issue. I only have about 16 linear feet of albums, and I end up selecting a dozen or so at a time to take downstairs to where the turntable lives. Even CDs - my most listened to ones (and honestly I don’t listen to many CDs these days) are in a 4 ft high revolving tower - not my favorite piece of living room furniture. The rest are stashed on some nice Spectra Wood (that’s a local brand) bookshelves and/or in my old basement office.
Doing needle drops (I hate that term) means locking in whatever my current audio chain is to the digital version. Not a huge concern, but still. And I used to rip to 320 bit MP3, and then to Ogg Vorbis, followed by FLAC and/or ALAC. So there is the matter of settling on something, and I think almost nothing was ripped to a high-res FLAC, usually just let it set on 16/44.1.
Finally getting lossless streaming has been nice. (Nodding to the Raspberry PI vs ?) part of this thread. Unless on my main system, or up where I keep the STAX amp and headphones, I usually am playing out to SONOS around the house, so high res is not an issue.
For my situation, the Pi’s are (currently) accessing about 69 GBs of only FLAC files @ 16/44.1 on my wireless, again all ripped (using EAC) from my personal CD collection. No struggles with that relatively low-demand load.
Even with it down clocked to 800MHz CPU & 400MHz RAM, the load reported is usually around .04 - .08 out of 4 while playing my FLAC files (as reported via top command). I have used high res tracks for testing while undercocking for stability testing (I think DSD 5.x MHz?), and if I recall correctly was seeing a load around and just under 1 out of 4. So from a pure music processing perspective, the Pi 3B+ handles it well.
But again, it sounds like there are other throughput bottlenecks to keep in mind when going the Pi route.