I also didn’t mean to necessarily say that it’s the fault of the Apple Mini as a server. Plenty people do that and are fine, too. I was just saying that I have all Apple except the server and I have none of the problems, so I think they lie elsewhere. I don’t know. A ROCK or Nucleus is probably the least ongoing work in many aspects, but I can’t guarantee that they make your problems go away.
Normally, for someone who is familiar with Macs, a Mini server should be fine, too, provided they apply the settings that prevent it from going to sleep and provided they do the the security setting dance after every update, which is necessary since Sequoia. From the pinned support post:
Both do
Same essentially for Nucleus. You need to add a music storage drive in both cases.
Depends on the number of tracks in your library. A little maybe, but a Nucleus One not that much. Otherwise they are very similar solutions, running the same software