Have you got a music collection on CD already? If so then your first task is to rip that collection onto an SSD drive using something like DB Poweramp, which will create bit perfect copies of your music so it will all be 44khz 16 bit, just like on the CD itself. This is indeed time consuming but with a modern Macbook Pro and a Super Drive it's reasonably quick, maybe 1-2 minutes per CD. I ripped 600 discs over the course of a few weeks whilst sitting at my desk working (from home). The benefit of this is that once it's done it's done and you can then box up your CDs and store them somewhere.
The other way to build a library is to buy the download from somewhere like Tidal or Qobuz, the latter often has higher resolutions files up to 196KHz/48bit, which when played on a good system, will offer a worthwhile improvement in sound quality, although it will be relatively marginal and how much difference you hear will depend on how good your system is.
I've never heard any report that say Qobuz doesn't offer the best audio quality; that's a new one on me. Certainly the file resolution Qobuz offers is often higher than for other mainstream download/streaming services, but Qobuz doesn't offer DSD, which is a new format for encoding music data that is considerably superior to PCM (which is the format all other music will be in). That said, none of the download/streaming services offer DSD; for that you have to look to specialist services which are purchase only, i.e. no streaming option.
Once you have all your music stored somewhere you then need to feed it into your system via a DAC. You can output from a Macbook or any other PC and simply play the files through the inbuilt media players. That's the simplest way but a big compromise on sound quality.
Think of the starting point in your replay chain as being like a CD transport; that's your music server and it's a combination of hardware and software but ostsensibly your music server is a PC, so any computer you already own can become your music server, but a dedicated machine, built for the purpose will be vastly superior to a regular home PC because home PCs are very noisy (electrically speaking, not audibly so).
Your music server (or transport) will combine optimised hardware and software to store, retrieve, prepare and pass as a digital stream the music you want to play to your DAC. Each of those steps needs to be managed correctly and optimised for music play back. For each step that you compromise in some way, you will reduce the fidelity of the final experience.
There are various player/management interfaces that will act to gather up the music you want from it's stored place, make it ready to pass to the DAC and then hand it over. That is ostensibly the combination of hardware and software but mostly we are focused on the user interface because it's the part we most readily engage with. So for example Roon, which acts to sit between your music stored on the server and you the user is one such interface. You can also still have other music players running behind Roon (like HQ Player or J River); in that instance Roon is merely the interface that makes your experience of browsing, choosing and exploring your music collection a much richer one. Think of it as being like getting all your CDs or vinyls out of an evening and pouring over the art work, reading the metadata or following the lyrics. I personally find Roon a transformative experience for music replay; for some reason it's a bit of a marmite thing and many people (on here) are very against it. I've never quite understood why but life's too short to worry about it!
If you go down the Roon option, you have to either buy a lifetime license or subscribe annually. You then need a Roon Server, i.e. the copy that sits with the music and does all the management of it. You then access that Roon server via a user interface, which you can download to your phone, tablet, laptop etc. If you are using your laptop/PC as the place where your music is stored then the Roon user interface and Roon Server will be the same device.
Also, Roon will interface with most other streaming services to give you access to streamed music. This is how I've expanded my music collection; Roon will select music for you after you've finished listening to an album you own based on what other people have listened to that is similar. It's called Roon Radio and it's a wonderful way to discover new music. If you hear something you like you can then download a copy that you own.
As with higher resolution file formats, playing from a stored local copy offers a marginal but still very worthwhile improvement in sound quality; the more revealing your system, the more noticeable that improvement will be.
Having done this transition myself four years ago and spent extensive time listening, I can promise you that a dedicated music server makes an enormous difference to music replay. This is also something that appears to be very contentious here, again I've no idea why so many people desperately need to assert that a music server, being just a PC, makes no difference. I went from using my Macbook Pro as the Roon Server (with my music on an SSD drive) to a dedicated music server (abeit a pretty high end one - about £7k all in), and the difference was startling. To quantify the improvement, the addition of that music server (an LDMS Mini Max by Lucas Audio Labs), was as big a step as moving from using the variable output on my DAC to control volume, to adding a £22k pre-amp.
Hope all this helps.
