Agreed. FLAC or ALAC. It's not terribly difficult to setup a NAS and stream, too. Occasional streaming for discovery.
Discussion
My next goal is to buy a NAS for streaming music, ebooks and manga, as well as backing up my GOG games.
N100 Mini PCs are great a start. Plenty can be found for less than $100. The N100 ITX boards aren’t super expensive either, and Proxmox can really do anything.
Never heard of these. How tough are they to set up and run/maintain? May be less than $100 but time is money as well. Might be an option if they don't take too much time to get going, but I'm curious if there's a catch (as other methods have had).
Oh, I agree. Synology would be the gold standard for doing things on easy mode, and if you’re really pressed for time go that route. Since they’re PCs, and Proxmox is a hypervisor (not the only one: TrueNAS, OMV are others), I’d say medium difficulty, but almost no maintenance. They tend to be devices you can set and forget once setup.
This is the way.