This will seem silly to anybody in this forum reading this message, but a year or so ago I was listening to my stereo system when it dawned on me that if the DAC was taking the digital stream from my CD, it should also take it from a hard disk !
Of course, I knew about iTunes, etc, but that always seemed to me NOT serious music, but more a lo-fi toy for people who don’t really care about music, but just want to hear a beat. The revelation came upon realizing how many 700MB CDs (we have over 400) would fit on the new 500GB drive I just bought for peanuts.
So surely there MUST be a system out there where one could dump one’s CDs onto a HD, and play them through a DAC and pipe them to the stereo. To my surprise there really wasn’t anything between even more lo-fi junk (think Sonos) and super-high end stuff like Meridian. I wanted an audiophile solution that wouldn’t bankrupt us. I went to a hi-fi dealer who confirmed my suspicion - that space hasn’t been filled by anything suitable as yet (that was a year ago). Then I came across Volumio.
It appears to fit what I am looking for, with a little DIY charm added in. Still not sure what to get and what to do, but looking forward to building myself something that will allow me to play my music with even better sound than I have now. And to open up a world of audiophile recordings on line (like Linn)
e sono contento che c’era un italiano che ha cominciato questo progetto 
Mille Grazie Michelangelo !
Auguri dal Canada
Marcello Pavan