Apple’s iOS 8.4 killed Home Sharing support for music

“Apple yesterday rolled out iOS 8.4 to iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users and the big news, of course, was the addition of Apple Music and Beats 1,” Chance Miller reports for 9to5Mac.

“It appears now, however, that Apple removed a feature still used by many from the operating system,” Miller reports. “As pointed out by several users on Apple’s Support forum, the company appears to have removed Home Sharing support for music in iOS 8.4.”

“The obvious solution to the problem is to switch to Apple Music’s family plan, which allows families of up to 6 to access Apple’s catalog of content for $14.99 per monthThe Home Sharing support page has also been updated to reflect that the feature is not present in iOS 8.4,” Miller reports. “Home Sharing originally launched in 2011 as part of iOS 4.3.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: As Miller speculates, this is likely a licensing issue related to Apple Music.

25 Comments

  1. Apple stated that the feature wasn’t available “at this time”, which is something that seems to either be ignored, or somehow, not noticed.

    Apple usually uses that phrase when temporarily removing a feature because of some bug that they are working on a fix for.

    1. Actually, it’s not. You can use Home Sharing from one computer to another, even under OS X 10.10.4, but what people are complaining about is that you cannot use Home Sharing on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad under iOS 8.4. The new Music app only allows access to music stored locally or on iCloud. The ability to stream songs to a mobile device from your Mac iTunes library is gone.

      You can still sync songs to your device, but only as many as fit. I have 15,000 songs on my Mac that take up 79 GB. All of that music was legally purchased, so I should be able to listen to it on any device I own anytime I like without having to jump through hoops. Until I upgraded, I could do exactly that. Now I have to anticipate which 3 GB (all that fits on my app-loaded iPhone or iPad) I might want to access and forget about listening to the other 76 GB without a trip back through iTunes on my Mac.

      Yes, I could use Apple Music or iTunes Match, but I do not have an extremely-high-speed unlimited Internet connection. Streaming from iCloud uses up valuable bandwidth that I didn’t require until I upgraded.

      Streaming is impossible when you are offline. Apple Music (for $180/year) allows downloading, but the copies have Digital Rights Management. Even the copies of music I have purchased outright will be unusable if I ever drop my subscription or the service goes under. In addition, a lot of the music I ripped from CDs and vinyl is not in the Apple Music catalog.

      iTunes Match (for just $25/year) should theoretically provide non-DRM music downloads and streaming for the music I own, but everything in the iTunes Store catalog gets converted to a medium-fidelity lossy format. Without Home Sharing, there is no way to listen to an Apple Lossless file unless it is on the device’s local storage. I am also hearing reports that some users are getting DRM’ed for some of their own music on Match, not just Apple Music.

      All in all, not a good thing. Since not everybody used Home Sharing, not everyone is affected by this. Every consumer’s use case differs. However, those who did use it are affected, and affected seriously. They are being forced to move to a third-party solution like Plex, which gives them one less reason to buy the latest and greatest from Apple. That is annoying enough without all the suggestions that our use case isn’t worth Apple’s trouble.

    1. Apple sucking a little less than others could be the result of a loose grommet.

      I suggest blowing smoke around until you see an opening and then stick some caulk in it. You will find this usually results in better sucking….

  2. Something else that appears to be missing: ‘Now playing’ and Shuffle Songs.
    Both of those feature I use pretty much all of the time, especially Shuffle, so losing them is tiresome, to say the least; I can’t be the only person who has large music libraries on their devices and likes to have a random selection playing when out and listening on their phone, pod or whatever, surely?

  3. The update broke my 5c phone and now none of the sounds work when I get a call or an IM and such. Thanks Apple.
    How about you test the software before you put it out.
    Your not Microsoft, are you

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.