I would also keep in mind energy usage, not because I'm a greenie but because I'm a cheapskate. If this is audio only I'd just use a RAID5 NAS or RAID external storage box and a media player like a Western Digital TV Live Plus or Netgear NEO550. Note: I've used the WDTV Live but not the NEO550 so I'm going by specs with the Netgear but its specs are intriguing. Both play FLACs just fine but Netgear claims that their NEO550 plays 24bit FLACs like the ones sold by HDTRacks.
Here's why... First of all a media player like the WDTV Live is no harder to use than a cable box which makes it a lot easier for the family to use than a HTPC. They also work well with Harmony remotes. They also have the added advantage of using very little energy.
Second, you'll want a storage solution that gives you redundancy or an easy way to backup or better yet both. Ripping once can be fun but reripping because a drive died sucks hugely. You can rip from you home PC and
copy to external drive attached to the media player or to a NAS and access the NAS from the player. Either way you'll want the music on 2 drives.
For ripping I highly recommend spending spending $38 for
dbPowerAmp Reference. All you have to do is setup a filing system and naming convention and feed it discs. It'll then automagically rip, name, file and tag all of your albums the way that you want them saving you a lot of work. You can then use the included batch converter to make copies in MP3 for your portable or AAC if you're a pod-person.
But before you do anything I'd think though and plan out your filing system. For example I use Drive:\Music\Artist\Album with a separate Drive\MP3\Artist\Album tree for music for my phone.
