I'm doing exactly the same, all my CDs are ripped and stored in big paper boxes. I also have no problem with good ripped mp3s, so I'm, fine to get my music also drm-free online, but I can understand why many prefer a better quality and so buy cds to rip them. Unfortunately only a few shops and labels offer flacs, which would be the best solution for this problem. At the end the cd is also just a medium to transport the digital data, and at the end I'm only interested in the music. The important question is if and how you save and backup your music, which isn't a problem as long as the music is drm-free. In my case all my music is on a big partition of my harddrive and backed up on an external harddrive.

Edit: Btw, CDs don't last forever, as. And to impress others vinyl was always better.

You should build your own shelves. My dad built his shelves for over 3000 cds.

iTunes is a load of balls, the post was referring to happily living without physical copies. As I said it meant no offence it wasn't a dig and more a general observation about people in general. :)

I guess it's dependent on the audio equipment you listen with. If you just have an iPod with cheap headphones, you probably won't be able to hear a difference, but if you got a really nice stereo and good boxes, I guess you can hear the differences.
There's also an argument to be made about frequencies that aren't audible to the human ear, but do affect your body, and thus your experience of the music, although I don't know to what extent this is true.

Ikea here has only I think one really shitty CD furniture that stands on the floor, and nothing to hang on the wall (Benno). I think MediaMarkt/Saturn have some really cheap ones for 20 CDs, where you can buy several and hang them up in a block, so you have one big rack.

I don't get it, every single furniture store offers media shelves for hundreds of CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays. What is so difficult about going there and buying one?

And the internet has made finding suitable media shelves even easier. A quick search on Google came up with individual solutions for up to 3,500 CDs, ready for order and deliverable in just a couple of days. You don't even have to leave your house, believe it or not.

i keep my cd's in drawers; some cd's i never opened.

I don't want them scratched

I use Rockbox on my mobile music players, so I never had any problems to play them. I believe also my Cowon and my Sansa player support flac out of the box, but honestly I never used the official firmware. Lately I searched for a new receiver and it seems most of them also can play flacs today. With the raise of smartphones there should be the option to use apps to play. I'm sure in the future we get a better support for flac in general, but unfortunately I also believe the demand for them will be not enough that ler more shops and labels offering them online. My biggest fear is that while smartphones are good for many different things the focus on audio-quality will go down and the manufacterer will take the opportunity to save some money on the audio-hardware (in tests I always read about the display quality, but less about the audio quality on good headphones). So while we maybe can play flacs easier in the future I fear it will be hard to find smartphones that let them also sound really good.

I have some music CD's but they are all for the car, the CD player in it is old and crabbit and doesnt like burned cd's even if they are straight copies form the original disk

I have a similar problem with my car's CD player, turns out it can only play cds written at 4x speed or lower. Assuming you can find a slow burner, see if that helps.

Thanks JMich, that might be it, i hope not to have that car much longer though.

I understand what you are saying. When I was a little kid, I discovered a lot of great bands like Queen by finding my father's collection of music cassettes. I popped em all into my dad's old cassette player. The music I heard was 1000 times better than the stuff on the radio. If all my dad's music was behind an iTunes account, I might still be living in a music dark age.

I have over 1200 catalogued CDs at the moment and 99% of them are in boxes. I always rip them to FLAC because keeping them around just isn't physically possible. (Well, I can't right now since the disc drive on my machine is a piece of crap that hangs at random.)

And I don't use any of that itunes bull. You might still be buying music but it's tied to an account and just... no. :\

I've seen flea markets sell CD towers in good condition for a couple of euros.