[ndaiger]

You can make it work with iTunes Match. It will upload all your music (it's not just filename or metadata matching, apparently it uses audio fingerprints).

Then you can play your own stuff without needing an Apple Music subscription.

It's $25/year.

I moved to Apple music a while ago, but iTunes Match worked great for me before that.

[myrandomcomment]

It has a limit of 100K tracks. I have 97,760 right now. I worked at a music store in HS & College so I managed to acquire quite a collection. At Christmas the employee discount basically reached 75% so if I even thought I might want one song, buying the album was a no-brain. At one point I had an 8-bay SCSI tower with CD-ROMs in it and wrote a script to rip all the CDs. It took a few weeks :) In the last few years I have started on the process of IDing things that where ripped at lower quality and re-ripping in as Apple Lossless.

[aikinai]

I had no idea this was still a thing! Does it work well? And what does it do if it can’t find a match? Will it let you play your unique song?

[rsanheim]

Still works for me. If it can’t find a match it will just upload your mp3s to apples servers and then I presume they can stream to a HomePod.

I mostly use Roon or my phone to control my music, so I haven’t really tested the match stuff in a long time.

[aikinai]

Great, thanks for the answer. I'll try out iTunes Match then. It sounds like exactly what I need.

[thdrdt]

Ehm $25/y to play your own music!?

I don't get it.

[_ph_]

It is a cloud storage service. You get all your music stored in the cloud. You always can use AirPlay to play your music on Homepods, if you like.