The gapless part is dictated by how the music was ripped. I use (and would reccomend) DbPoweramp, I rip to FLAC lossless. The following is coppied from the DbPoweramp web site. As you can see near the bottom, it supports ripping using gapless support.
FLAC is a lossless codec, meaning no audio quality is lost whilst compressing (unlike lossy codecs such as mp3 which throw audio data away), audio compressed to a lossless codec will be decoded identical to the source, think of it as zip for audio. All lossless codecs compress around 2:1 or 4:1 at best, a 3 minute audio track will be around 18 MB.
Supported by this Codec
- Encoding: Yes [.flac]
- Multi-processor Encoding: Yes (with dBpoweramp reference)
- Decoding: Yes [.flac .fla (optional)]
- ID Tag Reading: Yes [Vorbis Comments, id3v2, id3v1]
- ID Tag Writing: Yes [Vorbis Comments (default), id3v2, id3v1]
- Unicode Tagging: YesSupports Album Art: YesGapless Encoding & Decoding: YesExplorer Audio Popup Information: YesExplorer Columns: YesUnicode Filenames: Yes
I would highly recomend ripping to a NAS/Streamer, however, don't forget that network technology was not designed for sending/recieving music/video. You will encounter other issues unless you buy an all in one unit that stores the music locally. I use a Marantz NA7004 coupled to a Synology DS212j, the Marantz has a lot of good features, but if I navigate the menu away from the "Music Server" part, I can no longer see the NAS. I then have to turn both devices off and on again so that they will talk to each other.
I still love playing my music in this way though and I hope you will too.
Good luck.