When I started using Android I subscribed to Google Play Music. It allowed me to upload my music collection, including songs that we're on Google Play. It's not matching, like Apple. It's literally just taking my music and allowing me to store it in the cloud and download it onto mobile devices. It's really handy so far and makes much more sense compared to iTunes. Plus there's no "sync" concept once you're there. You just download music out of your collection or you don't.
I don't know how the iTunes matching works, but Play Music does swap out your version of a song with theirs if they see they're the same thing. I think this has only been within the last year or so that they started doing this though. I don't have any personal files anymore, so I can't comment on how accurate it is.
Play Music does match and does get it wrong, as I've found out with a few continuous albums where tracks have got swapped out for unmixed versions. You can manually tell it not to but only on a per-track basis (e.g. see https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1zruza/getting_kin...)
I feel like there's definitely a gap in the market for a cloud music service that is simple and effective, I would love to just upload all my music and know it was going to play back anywhere (desktop and mobile) with the original tracks and proper gapless playback, and I would be able to download my music back out of there, with a nice clean UI.
Apple Music fails because it swaps out tracks and is generally flaky (little control over the upload process, tracks don't play, etc.), Google Play fails because it swaps out tracks and has, IMO, a pretty horrible UI on both desktop and mobile.
I've played a little with Subsonic but found the clients lacking. Any other suggestions? Maybe I should just build my own!
Thanks for the link. They really boiled itunes down to the core product. Skipping through songs multiple times finally works quickly. I don't know how itunes lags with multiple song skips on an SSD.
