Does anyone have any luck with Apple Home Sharing anymore?

[Pretorious]

Home Sharing used to work rather well for me. I'd share my library on my main computer and was able to connect from my other computers, my iPhone and my iPad without a problem. Then, as my library size grew, connecting on my mobile devices took 10 minutes or more to connect. But it would finally connect. Now, my iPhone and iPad can never connect to my Home Shared library. Usually the connection indicator spins and spins, and the phone heats up, but nothing ever happens, and sometimes the Music app will just hang and crash. Connecting via my other Macs works fine still though, but mobile is important to me for convenience.

I'm forwarding the ports necessary to the devices but that doesn't seem to have helped at all; and as mentioned, my Macs connect fine still (with port-forwarding). All devices are on the same network.

Has anyone had any experience with this lately? It feels like it's a feature that Apple has let slip to the wayside as everyone has moved to streaming. Who knows if there are bugs in the way it connects to other devices. Has anyone got Home Sharing to work again after having any problems with it?

 

[middlemarch]

Haven't used Home Sharing for years, but I suspect most folks have moved their libraries (or copies thereof) to the cloud, and that's working fine for us.

 

[DWPress]

Apple's destruction of iTunes, which was never great to begin with, finally forced me into exploring things like jRiver and Roon which do the job flawlessly with local media and streaming if you want.

I still use Home Sharing for simple shared folders between local users.

 

[philipus]

I've never got Home Sharing to work via my iPhone. I believe it may have to do with Apple wanting its customers to use Apple Music instead, but that's just speculation.

Home Sharing also works as intended from our Macs. Our music is on an older Mac which shares its library. It works really well and the library (which is fairly large at 2200+ albums) loads within a few seconds.

To solve the problem of accessing the shared library from our phones I use an app called MusicStreamer. The library is available instantaneously and the app also offers offline storage and a rudimentary equaliser. I tried other similar apps but went with this one because it's easy to use and never loses the connection. I've been using it for four years and it still rocks.

cheers
Philip