It is not necessarily about saving space so much as it is about uniformity. And yes my server is beefy but you get 3 or 4 people all transcoding at the sane time and that beefy server will choke. As I have said I have been collecting for many years with a very large mixed bag of codecs I am just trying to clean up the mess that is my media.

I am investigating TDARR I know a few people have suggested it. I like the nodes feature so I can use my desktop running a heavy GPU as my 2U server cant really run a graphics card (no power connectors for it). I am using a multi node server with E5 XEON chips.

I use navidrome for the streaming and lidarr for downloads. I am not totally thrilled with navidrome as I can not play genres. I want to setup an icecast streaming server with individual “channels” for each genre