Originally Posted by
Droidophobe Been there, tried that. That function does not work because iTunes will not recognize those songs. Spent many hours on the phone with Apple tech support and was finally told that this prohibition was a new thing and that if I wanted to play my "non-iTunes-purchased" MP3's on my phone, I needed to subscribe to Apple Match, and I'd be able to stream my songs for which Match had a match.
Good lord, what terrible support.
If the files are truly MP3 files that have no DRM from another source, you can import them into iTunes. And then you can plug the phone into the computer and set the phone to sync music within the iTunes app, and all such music will sync to the phone and play just fine there.
You can play music on the iPhone without syncing with a computer using iTunes Match (so the songs either stream, or you can download them directly from the phone rather than by syncing with the computer), but that is a completely different thing.
iMore has a page that describes how to install iTunes on Windows, and then how to import files from your computer into your iTunes library. See
https://www.imore.com/how-install-itunes-12-windows-10 (ignore the stuff about purchasing and iTunes Match if you're not interested.)
And this page:
https://www.imore.com/how-sync-your-...or-ipad-itunes describes how to sync media from iTunes to your iPhone.
If this is still not helpful, there must be other resources online that I can point you to. Such as here:
https://support.apple.com/kb/ph20507?locale=en_US and here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201253