ripping CD collection; need help w bootlegs (metadata)

is the right answer (given the constraints) to simply set up a desktop PC in another room with DB Poweramp and a RAID 5 NAS hooked up to it to store the music, and then find some other app later that will read FLAC / WAV files off the NAS when i'm ready to stream to a DAC?

Yes, precisely.  There are several programs available (Sonos is one) that will play from your NAS drive. Get a redundant set up with a couple of decent sized (4 TB?) drives. Raid 5 requires at least 3 discs; Raid one is simple mirroring that needs only two discs.

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

As respects the metadata, one of the more popular tagging programs is MP3Tag. This is a free Windows program that will let you edit the audio file metadata to your heart’s content, including adding images for album covers. Don’t let the "MP3" in the program’s name discourage you. The FLAC format supports full tagging. Tagging WAV files is more problematic and, IMO, you accomplish nothing except waste more space.

Finally, don’t get too wrapped up on what device you store your ripped files. Once stored on a drive, you can backup or move them around to different places. I started ripping my files well over 10 years ago and am on my 4th music server -- just left a Vortexbox a few months ago and moved the collection (about 60,000 tracks) to a new PC running Fedora Core 31, a Linux OS variant. They could have just as easily been moved to a NAS, or a Windows or Mac PC.

Finally, while I have stuck with the LMS (Logitech Media Server) program over the year, my music collection is fully available to any other music server I decide to switch to in the future.