pfsense running on whatever hardware that doesn’t use too much power

You can also use komf alongside komga/kavita to just scrape metadata automatically upon import. A bit finnicky to get going (a tampermonkey script is required to give it accessible setting on the komga page) but works very well and even has a gui for identifying results and selecting the correct option if the auto scrape fails similar to jellyfin

For the actual reader part I just use komga as a server and read through Mihon (one of the tachiyomi forks) on my ereader mostly. occasionally I’ll use paperback on my iphone (although recently I’ve been trying Tachimanga, which is basically an iOS tachiyomi fork). Loads library, can sort by tag/library/date added, reads most things very well, can sync read status with the komga server (and/or manga updates or whatever), etc.

Flac 44.1 16bit level 3. Host with something that meets your needs. I have my files in jellyfin and navidrome and can then access the library remotely either through jellyfin web client, navidrome web client, substreamer, Finamp, kodi, etc. but this way if another amazing format comes up down the line I will always have my library in a good state to transcode from. Tag and sort everything with beets.io (or musicbrainz picard is great, I just like that beets is cli). This results in a library I can access on my phone, laptop, tv, carplay, etc

Technically you could go for 24bit but imo the extra file size isn’t justified. though one could make that argument for flac vs 320cbr mp3, transcoding 320 mp3 is more likely to create artifacts, thus the reason for keeping around flac

Alac may be easier for you if you use mac