What to do with the recordings?
 

No, I'm not talking about getting them to a record producer. ;) I started on this journey of recording a few years ago at my wife's request. I started out just playing and singing into the mic on an iPad Mini; progressed to using a Zoom H4n Pro, and for the last year I've been having way more fun using a Spire Studio.

So, now I have a decent collection of recordings that my wife would like to have easy access to. iTunes has morphed into a streaming service. She would like an easy app to access my recordings from her phone. What are folks here using for this?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Soundcloud. You get quite a bit of storage for free, I think it is about 3 hours or so. Or you can pay a monthly fee for unlimited storage.

Perhaps upload to youtube. First just add a picture to the recordings. I usually use Windows Movie Maker (free). Then a youtube app for your iPhone.

I load mine into iTunes and propagate them into the family's iPhones and iPads as needed. For quick access where there's Internet I'll sometimes also throw them into Dropbox.

Bob

Music (the app that replaced the music functions of iTunes in recent version of Apple IOS) still works as music player for locally stored files. If that's what you did and still want to do, you can still do that.

Yes, as you've noticed the world's attention is moving toward streaming services. If you're talking about wanting to not store your recordings locally, you can put your recordings on one of the popular online storage solutions (iCloud, Amazon cloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive etc) , and if you set them to be shared there, your family's phones can play them from those locations, and even if not shared, they'd be available to you there as well. I use OneDrive because it's inexpensive for the amount of storage and comes with the MS Office applications I use anyway, but I suspect this method is available with all the leading cloud storage solutions. I tap on the file I want to play in the OneDrive app and it plays in Apple Music (again, that's the new player app for music after the "all things for all kinds of stuff" iTunes was retired on newer versions of Apple's operating systems.

Upthread others have suggested places you can make your files publicly available. You can do that too, but I don't gather that you're asking how to curate a public presence for your recordings, a different situation with different aims.

I use Video Lan Client [VLC] for video and music on my iPhone.

It has basic functionality and less of the "bloat" of unnecessary features that iTunes is bogged down with.

If you are a Spotify user, Spotify can also play back local files.

Here's a handy dandy tool to see how much your mastered tracks will be effected by some of the various streaming services. I think they're all within a couple of dbs of each other, so don't worry if the service you choose isn't there.

It's good to check because if your track is too quiet, they'll raise the loudness and any noise on the track will also be raised. That's likely only to be an issue on parts of a song that are quiet with sparse instrumentation. If the track is way too loud, they'll compress it in a way that might make the song sound a bit flat compared to the file you upload due to loss of dynamic range.

Loudness Penalty Analyzer

bandcamp.com

Thanks folks. I have filled the free version of SoundCloud, and have more to add. iTunes dumped all the music she had on there that was downloaded from CDs over the years. I'll take a second look at Apple Music to see how to find a way to load the multiple hours of music I've recorded, so she can have that music available at any time (not streaming).

I appreciate the suggestions.

You can open another Soundcloud account using a 2nd email address.

Bandcamp is free, and you can put the settings to allow people to listen (without paying for) your music for free as many songs as they want - or limit them.

I've been using iTunes for many years and a little disappointed at the change at Apple, but I get that having folks pay for streaming services is the current business model everyone is chasing. (Why I can't get Disney movies on Netflix anymore, and a thousand other slings and arrows...).

But, when the latest iOS was installed on my iPhone, it did not obliterate anything. The installed app is, indeed, called Music, but my library is still there. So, not sure what happened in your case. Now, I am running an older version of OS X (High Sierra) and it's still iTunes here, but that syncs just fine with the phone and updates the "Music" library OK. Of course, that's not a solution for online access, but anyone that was in the iTunes world shouldn't have lost music, from my experience, anyway.

You could always pay for a SoundCloud account, and let folks use the SoundCloud player app.