In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution anymore it used to be. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.
And you can upgrade a NUC with more RAM up to 32 GB if you pick a model which supports that amount.
Download straight from the source like Deezer so you know your file is legit and not a user generated file who re-encodes a 128kbps mp3 to flac.
Yes, get the Spotify link of a song, playlist or album. Then go to the options of doubledouble top, choose for MP3 320kpbs in the Spotify section.