Home Sharing no Longer Available for Music in iOS 8.4

iTunes and iOS have a feature called Home Sharing, which lets you, for example, share an iTunes library to an Apple TV, or to another computer running iTunes on your local network. Prior to iOS 8.4, it also allowed you to share your iTunes library directly to your iOS device; when it worked.

This Home Sharing to iOS devices was notoriously fickle (as in, it hardly every worked). When I wrote this article, part 12 of my Fixing iTunes series, I did an informal poll, and found that it was rare indeed when it was able to load a music library. And the only cases where it worked was when the library was quite small.

This feature is not part of iOS 8.4; at least not for music. It’s still there for videos, in the Videos app, and, as I write this article, I’m attempting to load my video library on my iPhone. My iTunes library has about 200 movies, and some 350 TV episodes. Yet loading even that library is very long, and …

Since the library still hadn’t finished loading when I was writing the above sentence, I went to do something else. For about ten minutes. And then I could finally see my movies and TV shows.

Home sharing

This feature has always been unreliable. I won’t miss it for music, since it never worked for me.