Help with choosing music server

You rip a CD and it pretty much gets organized the same way iTunes does.

I don't like amount of scrolling you have to do to get to particular album in Itunes, but if you create "smart playlists" for each genre (like "genre IS Jazz") then Itunes displays whole page of thumbnails of all records in the genre - much easier to use.

As for the server - I use WiFi on Mac Mini to transfer data (on 5GHz band) to Airport Express, then by Toslink to Benchmark DAC3.   I keep my computer ON all day placing it in the "SLEEP" mode at night.  It wakes up instantly.  Since I'm sending data (no timing) over Wi-Fi computer (playback program, speed, amount of memory) is not important.  Same (other than conducted electrical noise) goes for Ethernet or async. USB.

Fast, I had the same problem of dropouts until I changed to 5GHz band (bought dual band router).  2.4GHz has only 3 channels (since each of 12 channels is more than 3 channels wide).  5GHz, in addition of higher number of channels, has advantage of poorly penetrating walls.  It is advantage, because it suppresses more 5GHz signals from the outside of the house.  In addition less people use 5GHz routers (less traffic) and no cell phone frequencies (that are around 2GHz).