Rhyno, it looks like you're on the right track.
To answer your question about file formats, I'd strongly recommend FLAC. It's the best combination of file size, tagging ability, and device support. And if you ever wanted to, you could convert FLAC into WAV; the opposite might not be completely true, as WAV doesn't have good standards for tagging, so you might not be able to reliably preserve what the music represents, which is just as important as the music itself.
An NAS can be useful for allowing multiple computers to access it over the network. On the other hand, a hard drive connected to a desktop PC can simply be shared to other computers on the network, so this isn't a huge advantage. A multi-drive NAS can allow for greater storage capacity and fault-tolerance with hard drive failures (raid5 can tolerate one failed drive, raid6 two). But honestly, with multi-terabyte hard drives being the norm nowadays, a single hard drive is adequate for storing even large lossless music collections.
Much more important than RAID (which protects against hard drive failures only) is regular, automated backups. And this needs to be both local and offsite (usually online with sites like Backblaze). You're putting a lot of time into ripping CD's and organizing the music. Don't let an accidental delete command or virus destroy years of effort.
You're also on the right track with using software like dbPoweramp to manually edit/verify the tags on the files to ensure that the artist, song, etc is all there the way you want and in a consistent fashion. (This gets really complex with classical music, but is much more straightforward for most other types of music.) I use MediaMonkey but there are a number of good choices here.
Having your data stored on a desktop PC is a great idea, because it's very flexible, and you can point multiple types of software to the same data. It's also future-proofed, as you're not tied into one particular streamer.
And last, when you're ripping CD's, ensure that you aren't inadvertently altering the data by having "leveling track volume" or similar option chosen. You want clean rips of the underlying CD data.
Good luck, and congratulations for starting to invest the effort that will make your music so much more accessible to you in the long run!
Michael
To answer your question about file formats, I'd strongly recommend FLAC. It's the best combination of file size, tagging ability, and device support. And if you ever wanted to, you could convert FLAC into WAV; the opposite might not be completely true, as WAV doesn't have good standards for tagging, so you might not be able to reliably preserve what the music represents, which is just as important as the music itself.
An NAS can be useful for allowing multiple computers to access it over the network. On the other hand, a hard drive connected to a desktop PC can simply be shared to other computers on the network, so this isn't a huge advantage. A multi-drive NAS can allow for greater storage capacity and fault-tolerance with hard drive failures (raid5 can tolerate one failed drive, raid6 two). But honestly, with multi-terabyte hard drives being the norm nowadays, a single hard drive is adequate for storing even large lossless music collections.
Much more important than RAID (which protects against hard drive failures only) is regular, automated backups. And this needs to be both local and offsite (usually online with sites like Backblaze). You're putting a lot of time into ripping CD's and organizing the music. Don't let an accidental delete command or virus destroy years of effort.
You're also on the right track with using software like dbPoweramp to manually edit/verify the tags on the files to ensure that the artist, song, etc is all there the way you want and in a consistent fashion. (This gets really complex with classical music, but is much more straightforward for most other types of music.) I use MediaMonkey but there are a number of good choices here.
Having your data stored on a desktop PC is a great idea, because it's very flexible, and you can point multiple types of software to the same data. It's also future-proofed, as you're not tied into one particular streamer.
And last, when you're ripping CD's, ensure that you aren't inadvertently altering the data by having "leveling track volume" or similar option chosen. You want clean rips of the underlying CD data.
Good luck, and congratulations for starting to invest the effort that will make your music so much more accessible to you in the long run!
Michael