[paddington]

Do not archive your stuff in lossy formats like WMA or MP3. It's a waste of your time and your collection.

Use EAC (application) to extract the WAVs from the CDs and use "FLAC Frontend" (google for that - get it from SoundForge - free of charge) to convert them to FLAC level 8 (yields the smallest file size at the expense of CPU usage when played back).

The FLAC files can be decompressed to yield the EXACT WAV files that came from the CD - hence, you can make a physical CD from them at any time. There's even a drag-and-drop FLAC plugin for Nero 6 (and up).