uh. the hysteria over Apple "adding DRM to your music" is unfounded. it adds it if you "upload" that music up to their Apple Music cloud for streaming.

iTunes Match matched tracks still have no DRM.

I'll check it out. I switched to Mac/iTunes at the same time as the author and I lost interest in iTunes at the time they introduced iTunes Match. Also I now use an Android phone so I had to figure that bit out already. I have a large music collection that I rsync'd to linux and I have a copy in windows. Foobar2000 and Clementine are more enjoyable for me as players. I buy all of my digital music from Amazon or eMusic so that's not an issue.

I'll give Swinsian a try; it seems like a good replacement.

If you're looking for a networked library, Subsonic [1] is a bit more complicated, and a bit uglier, but has the amazing feature of being able to play your music from anywhere, any device, by anyone you allow.

[1] http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp

How is the Apple Music DRMing of your own music not randomware?

"We encrypted your files. We won't ever give your real files back. Pay us or you can't use them anymore."

I replaced iTunes with a CLI program called cmus https://cmus.github.io/

Looks like a good replacement for iTunes, if all you need/want is library management. Only catch for me is that it doesn't rip from CD.

If you want to rip from cd there are better options than what's built into iTunes (with better error correction, metadata fetching, and such). It's not actually any more complicated, involving just opening Maxx and letting opening the files it rips in your media player.