My use case is that I grab house hunters for background tv. Do I need that at high quality? No definitely not. For most shows I’m at 1080p, then for shows/movies I really like I’ll grab higher quality.
Do you have any old hardware that doesn’t have a job? That is a great place to start. Take some time try out different solutions (proxmox, unraid, casa OS). Then as you nail down your needs you can better pick hardware.
I started using Lidarr. I have had a bit of a hard time with it not being able to just grab a song.
I think this is more in how I have my expectations and workflow set up. It works great for what it’s built for, I need to spend some time to adjust.
I use it with the Deemix plugin and that is great.