I didn't trash my CDs time did. A decade spent in a carry case in my car in the southern heat has caused a lot of them to have the foil start separating. So the vast majority have at least one or two tracks that won't play or rip now.

Where you getting external drives for $30? The 2TB Toshiba drive I’ve purchased many times over the past 5 years for under $70 is now $150. Even the 1TB drives are over $100 these days

Try music brains picard if you want to fix that problem. Still takes time but it helps ALOT (it's free)

Soulseek is a godsend, but it's a bit clunky. I'm looking for some other fronted and stumbled onto nicotine+ that I haven't tried yet, any ideas or pointers?

Just be sure to use something like Spek to to inspect the files if you use Soulseek. I've used it to find some obscure music I couldn't purchase, and sometimes people literally just re-encode MP3 files to FLAC, the data is still lost, reconverting won't recover it.