Mac Pro hardware/software recs- Want to get this right first time! Options

[capital]

I'm getting prepared to encode my large collection of >1400 CD's.
I obviously only want to do this once, so I'd like to make sure I do properly the first time. I'm hoping to some advice as to how to best go about this. I was looking through t

I'm using a Mac Pro, and my options are as follows:

Hardware:
-Mac's Internal CD/DVD drive (not sure what kind it is, Hitachi?. Model is listed as HL-DT-ST DVD-RW GH41N.
-external Yamaha F1DX
-buy something new? Internal or external?

Software side: (planning on using XLD)
-use iTunes (with error correction turned on)
-use Max 0.9.1
-use xACT 2.13 (would need some settings suggestions here since I've never iced it)
-use XLD?



So what do you think?

This is going to take long time to complete, so switching back and forth between OSX and Windows, or running parallels or something is going to add an extra layer of complication I'd rather ovoid. I am pretty committed to using Mac software only..
I'll being using Apple Lossless too, rather than FLAC since I use iTunes as my Library.

Thanks guys!

[mixminus1]

For the software, XLD.

Drive-wise, the main thing I'd be concerned with is burning out your Mac Pro's internal drive...that's a lotta CDs.

So, if that Yamaha F1DX works fine with XLD, I'd start there unless that's a particularly expensive/rare drive that you'd like to keep around (Google turns up links mostly to Yamaha motorcycles, so not sure how much that thing costs).

[capital]

The Yamaha is an old CD writer from around 2002, nothing special. Turns out it will only works in real time (!) using XLD for some reason, so that's not going to work!

This post has been edited by db1989: Oct 2 2011, 13:33

Reason for edit: Please don’t pointlessly full-quote posts.