This is a good question. No idea if the Octave Server will include a CD drive and provide this as a feature. While convenient, ripping CDs can be its own personal thing and religion. Probably needs, and probably has, its own thread somewhere but let me expand on this just a bit (pun intended). When ripping a CD you are concerned with two things: reading the bits off the disc accurately and storing those bits into containers organized in a way you’ll be happy with.
Reading accurately… there are various ways to do this but I find most of the “vault” based all-in-one ripper / streamers prefer speed over accuracy and don’t give you any options in this area. If all of your CDs are pristine this may not be an issue. But, I prefer running something like dbPoweramp where I have full control, use accuraterip, and decide what to do if there is an issue.
Container… There is some debate that what file format, what container, you use matters. Personally, I believe bit perfect is bit perfect so I like FLAC as its the most portable and supports lots of metadata including embedded artwork. If you’re an Apple user you may like ALAC. If you’re a purist you may like WAV or AIFF. The nice thing about using the Server is often times you don’t have a choice; it just works. Us control freaks don’t like not having a choice so we want to decide how we’re storing the files. Again, use a computer and make the choice.
Then there is the question of organization. Artist/Title/Track works for some, others like to organize by genre, and one time there was this awesome fella who organized autobiographically. Some Servers, like Roon don’t care (actually Roon ignores the file path) and Servers use the path to help identify what artist / album the track belongs to.
A Server with ripping capabilities is nice because you rip and forget. But some of us like a lot more control and use a computer. And, there are plenty of software on computer that give you rip and forget functionality too. Also, I’ve not even touched on the issue of metadata… that is making sure the files created from the CD have the right artist, track titles, credits, etc. CDs don’t contain this info so the ripping software / Server needs a way to figure it out (whole other discussion on how that works) or you have to type it all in or at least fix it if the ripping software gets it wrong.
One other note… start ripping now. It’s a time consuming process. Some 1000 CDs took me like half a year. If you rip to something like FLAC and have a fairly standard way of laying out the directory structure then when your Server arrives you’ll be ready to go. I’d much rather spend 6 months listening to my collection on a new Server than ripping CDs into it when it arrives. Storage… use a USB drive or set-up some network storage. But also remember hard drives fail so whatever you do for storage get 2 and keep them in sync. Good luck.