I did the same after bending a small cluster of pins in a corner pushing a CPU into its socket. Worked fine.

It's a relief, isn't it.

As I said, I'm 99% certain it wasn't me. I managed to break the 'near-field' connector on my other half's phone when fitting a new battery - tiny little metal springy thing about a millimetre all round. She has never missed it but ever since then I've been absolutely paranoid about messing around near little metal springy bits and fit CPUs etc with enormous care. Even so, when I looked at the socket there was that nagging doubt in my mind. ZIF sockets are so much easier and I've never bent a CPU pin. I can see the reasoning: mobo with an average cost of say £75 vs CPU with an average cost of £250, so put the pins on the mobo (also 'not my problem' for Intel).

Scan are being slow over my CPU cooler refund. I assume they're relying on insurance to cover costs so have to wait to get it back. When I've returned stuff to the evil-empire of Amazon, I've had the ping of a text notifying my refund seconds after the pick-up point has scanned my returns parcel.

So now the little beast is up and running (silently), I'm starting the lengthy process of ripping a few hundred CDs to .flac format, oh, and picking a music player. I say a few hundred, but I don't really know how many. It may be 1000 or more. I always assumed that the software choices would be easy, after all there are dozens of rippers capable of churning out FLAC and dozens of media players to choose from. Not so.

The first thing I found is that Windows 10/Explorer/WMP etc. aren't really compatible with FLAC. Yep, you can make WMP play FLAC with the appropriate codec and then Windows and Explorer will recognise them as music files. Problem is that Windows doesn't handle the metadata tags in FLAC properly. It's a bug that's been there for years and MS have no obvious interest in fixing it. Most obvious symptom is that all things Windows will truncate the displayed track/song title to 26 characters. Nor can you correct this by editing in Explorer via the properties dialog as you can with most basic metadata. What you can do is royally screw the existing metadata. Top tip: if you try to correct this with another tag editor then Windows is quite likely to deny that the file has any metadata at all. It's all there. If you use WMP as a ripper then it rips just fine and even downloads and inserts metadata just fine (some of the genre decisions are a bit weird but MS isn't alone in that). Well, I say 'just fine' but that's if you know to turn off autoplay and autorip. Otherwise it has a habit of missing all info for the track it started to play. Oh, and sometimes it ignores your decision not to autoplay and autplays anyway, unless you manually add a registry DWORD just for CDs. Oh, and WMP totally relies on metadata as a player, so that's a bit sad for FLAC. WMP will take a squint at the library it happily ripped, and organise it for you. Only it will miss a few tracks from an album. It will give you odd un-named albums from unknown artists (made up of the missing tracks). And it will sometimes decided not to play a track, but the next one instead. So, all in all, best to stay clear of WMP as a ripper and player if you're interested in using FLAC.

I know that many will say that's an obvious decision even without experimenting. But then there's the fun I've had since with some other highly regarded software...
 

You really are taking advantage of all the extra time you have with retired life!
I'd obviously recommend some sort of command line based Linux thing (if I knew of one), but I doubt that really helps you right now.

I've had a quick search and I think I may have used CDex in the past for MP3s. I also remember Exact audio copy being popular.

I always use dbPowerAmp for ripping and VLC for playback.

I've a feeling I did OK with something called Media Monkey last time I wanted to batch a load of music ripping. Something like that, anyway!

MusicBee does Flac outtadabox. By far and away the best music player I've seen, wish it was on Linux too.

I spent nearly a whole day with MusicBee - I felt I owed it to teh forum. It has a devoted following, does loads and loads of stuff and is probably a huge achievement. I'm sure it's great. I didn't like it. I thought it was unintuitive and unnecessarily complicated for even simple steps. The final straw for me was that with a clean hard drive and a single folder with about 150 FLAC files ripped into it, it totally and completely refused to even see them let alone organise and play them as a library of music. This being pretty much my idea of the primary function of a music player, I gave up. 

My aim is to have something really simple that doesn't do a bazillion things. At the moment I'm giving Dopamine a whirl. It's as simple as it gets and just happens to be my favourite so far of the half dozen I've played with.

VLC is great and I wouldn't be without it for some of the naughty things I do to video files etc. But I want something that looks even easier as soon as it fires up so that Mrs WilliamA who is totally non-techy doesn't get put off and can get at her CDs.

I used to use DBPoweramp all the time. Can't remember why I stopped now. I'm trying out Exact Audio Copy which was a bit of a pain to set up and not as "one-button" as most, but does a fantastic job of producing accurate archive copies.

I'm using Exact Audio Copy now. It's very good indeed, slightly more hands-on than most and it doesn't like a network drive as the target (which I found out after a couple of totally unhelpful error messages). But it's very reliable with rip quality.

Fair enough with VLC. The versatility is virtually unparalleled, but it does have a touch of the beardies about the UI.
 
Maybe because they starting charging? There are clean, cracked versions all over teh Jimiverse, though, if you want to renew the acquaintance.

I'm not too fussed now that I've found something that works. I have two optical drives on my main desktop which is some help, but I still have to manually load each disk and remove the last one whatever I use.

have you tried foobar as a music player? a lot of people seem to swear by that. I think it's one of those ones that is quite powerful in terms of configuration, so it might be a bit wild at first but hopefully you can set it up to make it simple for MrsA.

What's your own media player of choice, Milko Bar Kid?

I stumped up for dBPoweramp - best money I've spent on software. If the price hasn't sky rocketed, I'd recommend trying it again. We've got somewhere in the region of 2000 cds and it's the quickest ripper I found - 1 cd will take less than 2 minutes to rip as FLAC. There's some inbuilt clevers which can fill in any gaps or read errors that scratches cause. It also comes with a batch converter, which was damn useful for converting the lossless files to mp3 so I could stick the entire collection on my phone.

Really. That surprises me. Complete opposite of my experience, else I wouldn't have recommended it. Simple, idiot-proof, bullet-proof. IME.

What version of Windows did you try it on?

> it totally and completely refused to even see them let alone organise and play them as a library of music

If you've got the tracks listed in Inbox, select all, right click, Send To > Music Library.

Whilst not directed at me, I find that an interesting question because I've not thought about how I play music in a long time. My answer historically would have been Winamp followed by VLC, then maybe Kodi/XBMC on the TV.

Nowadays I don't listen to an awful lot, but it is usually limited to Spotify or Google Play music. Either via my phone to a Chromecast Audio device, or using the browser on a computer. I can't remember the last time I played back anything from my large MP3 collection. If anything I just use them to transfer to my iPod for long flights.

I keep toying with the idea of making some sort of dedicated music listening room, but then quickly realise that I don't listen to enough to justify that. Whilst it might push me to listen to more, it probably won't and it'll go unused.

I think you've identified the issue right there.

I asked this question today in my (young, at least by comparison (manthorp) ) office, and the default answer was Spotify.

It partly ages me: I like to 'have' the music, in a a legacy echo of owning vinyl, or cassettes, or CDs. But it's also about rarities: I have rips from bootlegs, home recorded stuff, Jimmed obscurities etc. that the licit brands just don't - can't - have on their books.