I use AirPlay quite a bit. If I'm not mistaken though, the AirPlay-enabled receivers can only do audio streaming. Perhaps you can confirm that for me. I have an Apple TV box which allows me to use AirPlay to mirror most anything on any of my iOS devices (or Mac) to my TV. Or I can stream any media I have on any of those devices, from either of my computers (including my PC), or from my iCloud accounts to the TV or stereo system - movies, videos, pictures, music. That box is something like a Roku, but it doesn't offer nearly as many 'channels'. It has Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus and a few others - but the main benefit of it is the AirPlay functionality.
As for your moving from CDs to iTunes, I did that myself a couple of years ago. I had several thousand CDs but only a small portion of them were ripped into my iTunes library (to listen to on the computer or load on MP3 players that I had). When iTunes Match was introduced I decided to rip my entire CD library and not be bothered with CDs at all anymore. It doesn't require much effort, but if you have a lot of CDs it will take a while.
I would recommend that you go into Preferences in iTunes and, under the General tab, select
Import CD and Eject where it asks
When you insert a CD. I would also check that box that says
Automaticaly retrieve CD track names from internet. Once you've done that, all you need to do is insert one CD after the other and iTunes will do the rest for you. Whenever I was using my computer for other reasons, I'd have a case of CDs nearby and insert a new one when I noticed it eject the previous one. The process didn't need to consume much of my attention. And if most of your CDs are normal store bought ones, it will be able to pull the track names for you and fill in much of the meta data about each song / album. Every now and then it will find a CD it doesn't know and you'll have to go back and fill in the song names yourself. It can also pull track names for homemade CDs, but not as reliably.
You can also add any music you happen to already have on your computer to the iTunes library - digital purchases you may have made from somewhere else (e.g. Amazon) or MP3 files you got from other sources. One of the pulldown menus will have an
Add to Library… option. When you're adding music you have elsewhere on your computer, you can decide to have iTunes make a copy of it and place that copy in its file directory or, in effect, just make a note of where it is so it can use it when it needs to.
Before you rip all your CDs you might want to tinker with the encoding method / quality settings. Under Preferences > General > Import Settings you'll find a number of options. You can rip songs as AAC files, AIFF files, MP3 files, WAV files, or Apple Lossless files. For most of those you can also adjust the bit rate. I use AAC files and the iTunes Plus default bit rate (256 kbs). The quality is pretty good and the files still don't take up too much space. However, if you don't want to sacrifice any quality - especially if you'll be playing your music at a decent volume - you might want to try Apple Lossless. That will eat up a lot of storage space, and if you're streaming it over WiFi while other people are loading the WiFi network you may experience some lag. My recommendation would be to rip a few CDs as Apple Lossless and as, e.g., AAC and compare how they sound through your stereo (compare them blindly if possible
). You can then decide if the quality difference is noticeable and meaningful enough to you. If you rip everything as Apple Loseless, you can always go back and convert those files to AAC.
From there, I'm not sure what else you're interested in doing / knowing. I use iTunes Match myself, but that might not be too useful for you if you only have 1 iOS device - you can probably just load whatever music you want on the iPad. If you have specific questions about what's possible or how to do it, feel free to ask.
EDIT: There's also a setting in iTunes under Preferences > Store that will allow it to automatically retrieve the artwork for the CDs you import. It doesn't always find it automatically, but it does more often than not. And I should have mentioned playlists, you'll most likely want to make some of those (e.g. christmas music, party music, rock). Once you have the music in the iTunes library, you'll be able to search for and select it by artist, song, album, genre, or playlist. I suspect you'll be able to figure out how to set up playlists though, and moving music from one place to another (e.g. to add it to a playlist) is just a matter of dragging and dropping.
