I have been doing this for years using Mac mini's. I would suggest using either XLD or MAX.
I configure the bit rate to a higher rate. I have used a few different playback software application (audirvana, pure music, others) and I prefer Audirvana 2.X with their iPad app to control playing music. I configure the ripping to store the music in AIFF format in iTunes, but I don't use the integrated iTunes mode in Audirvana. In Audirvana, I can have multiple disks/folders containing iTunes files, flac files, wav files, and Audirvana can read all of them. IMO, I think dedicated music servers are way over rated and way over priced for what they do. Remember the Sooloos system, all it was good at was displaying content. If you want something similar, check out roon. The problem with what I see with roon is that it doesn't sound as good compared to other well known playback software. Also I would stay with Macs using a Mac mini. To get better quality playback, don't hook up hard disks to your Mac mini. Purchase either a NAS device or hook these hard drives to a remote server so your music server won't have any disk drive noise or vibrations coming from these external disks nor will they compete on the same bus that connects to your external dac.
I configure the bit rate to a higher rate. I have used a few different playback software application (audirvana, pure music, others) and I prefer Audirvana 2.X with their iPad app to control playing music. I configure the ripping to store the music in AIFF format in iTunes, but I don't use the integrated iTunes mode in Audirvana. In Audirvana, I can have multiple disks/folders containing iTunes files, flac files, wav files, and Audirvana can read all of them. IMO, I think dedicated music servers are way over rated and way over priced for what they do. Remember the Sooloos system, all it was good at was displaying content. If you want something similar, check out roon. The problem with what I see with roon is that it doesn't sound as good compared to other well known playback software. Also I would stay with Macs using a Mac mini. To get better quality playback, don't hook up hard disks to your Mac mini. Purchase either a NAS device or hook these hard drives to a remote server so your music server won't have any disk drive noise or vibrations coming from these external disks nor will they compete on the same bus that connects to your external dac.