[blowfish721]

Are you talking about iTunes Match which is $25/year? I used to keep everything myself in iTunes (music and movies/series) but the hostility towards local files had me move elsewhere. The not being able to search for local files is beyond annoying when using an apple tv and having a large local library in iTunes, I know they have since split iTunes into different apps.

[hericium]

I don't remember how much exactly they wanted or what was the service name that would resolve this freshly introduced annoyance. Some Apple stuff is more expensive where I live, than in the U.S. but it may have been $25 yearly not $20 monthly.

It pretty much looked like an extortion attempt: Apple blocked my access to owned, legal, lossless music files in their proprietary AIFF format and offered presumably the same music streamed from their servers for a fee.

IIRC this sharing functionality worked until Mojave and became problematic with the introduction of Catalina. It went from being an option in iTunes to being an option in the Sharing menu in System Preferences. It still used DAAP as an underneath technology but became problematic, with browsable but not playable library etc.

Before that, I had an IKE VPN set up from iPhone to home network which allowed accessing music residing on iMac's HDD while biking or hiking, on iPhone with much less storage than music library weight.