I’ve been using iTunes Match almost continuously for my music since September 2012. That’s a scarily long time. I’d been using iTunes even longer.

In 2026, I’m finally ready to move on.

iTunes Match, for those unfamiliar, is effectively a predecessor to Apple Music. Rather than a subscription to an entire catalogue of music, it was a subscription to stream your music collection. Sounds a little silly, but it did offer some tangible benefits;

1. You don’t need to keep your entire library synced to your iPhone¹
2. Matched tracks could be “upgraded” to iTunes Plus quality if you had, say, an inferior 128kbps MP3 copy
3. Easy playback across devices, streamed from the internet; your music follows you anywhere
4. You could always download songs anyway; if you were going on a flight you could grab a few albums you planned to listen to and they’d be there for you

Ultimately, though, iTunes Match was a bit of a dead end, and perhaps Steve Jobs was the last Apple personality to truly care about it. Eventually Apple Music subsumed its features, but the legacy subscription stuck around, largely unmaintained, ever since.²

For a few years now we have kept a NAS at home. It’s great! It stores a bunch of our personal files, backups, and other precious data, like our movie and TV show collection. We have a Plex server running off it. Plex led me to think about my use of iTunes Match more, as it offered Plexamp, a quite decent little music player app for Plex.

Plexamp, however, just left me wanting more. It had issues on certain platforms, some playback and stability issues, and seemed to be written by people with some degree of contempt for anyone who thought any differently to them about how things should behave.

That led me down the path of trying out Navidrome. Navidrome is the Jellyfin of music; it’s open source, pretty quirky, and the default user interface is pretty rubbish. But it opens up one particularly intriguing option; it has an entire ecosystem of apps which are compatible with it.

With a Navidrome server in place, I am able to pick and choose player apps as I please, and the collection, playback stats, and scrobbling are all centrally-managed. Nice!

For Desktop, I settled on Feishin, a stylish web and desktop app (yeah, sorry, it’s Electron) which I find fairly intuitive and usable. I’ve run into a few quirks, particularly due to my music library being largely AAC and ALAC from years of iTunes use, but I have confidence they’ll be sorted out. The developer is quite responsive.³

On my iPhone, I like Arpeggi, which is sadly currently only available as a TestFlight beta, but is one of the nicest music apps I’ve ever used. Simple, modern, and reliable. I will gladly pay for this once the author is ready to publish it for real.

After a few months of running this setup, I was finally convinced; I didn’t need iTunes Match anymore. On the 2nd of February, it expired. And I’m pleased to say that I barely noticed!

Well, today, dear reader, I reached another milestone in this journey. I added my first new music without touching the Apple Music (née iTunes) app. FLACs put through Musicbrainz Picard for tagging and then transferred to the NAS. Navidrome immediately picked up the new albums, and they appeared like clockwork in Feishin and Arpeggi.

And it’s pretty great.

Do you have a favourite Navidrome client? Any fun ways you’re using third-party tools? Drop me a line 😄