How make a home shared iTunes library load faster on iPhones?

[pullman]

I have set up home sharing on our large iTunes library and it loads reasonably quickly on our MacBooks and on the Apple TV 3. But on iPhones it is p-i-t-i-f-u-l-l-y slow, so much so that it becomes completely unusable.

I have read heaps of posts here and elsewhere that this is normal and has been for probably over ten years.

But I'm curious to know if there are for instance network settings (on the Mac sharing the library, on the router or on, in our case, the AirPort Extreme) to speed up the library's load times?

Or are there perhaps other settings that may have an effect?

Thanks in advance
Philip

 

[Stephen.R]

We had this issue for a long time. Since maybe Mojave-ish time it's got significantly faster in my experience.

I'll test it now. For reference, I'm on Catalina so I no longer have "iTunes", but I have a <checks> 7.14TB "TV" library (556 movies, 4228 TV episodes); and a paltry 37.5 GB "Music" library (2734 songs).

I'm going to load the shared library for each on my iPhone 7, which has.. non-beta iOS is out I guess.


Ok the music library took 20.55 seconds from tapping the shared library name (under home sharing) until the shared library appeared.

The "TV" library timer stopped at 20.51 seconds but my reaction on that wasn't as good - I'd say it's probably closer to 20 flat or maybe even 19.something.

I guess the big question is what devices specifically are involved in your environment and what OS/Software versions are involved?

 

[pullman]

Thank you very much Stephen, both for writing back and for testing. Those are very interesting - and good - results.

I am using an iPhone X with iOS 13.4.1 and the library is shared from a Mac Pro running El Cap. Opening the shared library (25000 songs) in the Music app takes upwards 5 minutes. I get the same result on the 2,4GHz and the 5GHz wifi networks. As far as I am able to tell by looking at the wifi icons on the phone and the server the signal is good.

When a library loads in 20 seconds it's not a problem that the library isn't remembered if one switches to another app and then back to Music, but when it takes five minutes it makes the feature useless. I really don't understand why this shouldn't be as quick as on the Mac.

Cheers
Philip

We had this issue for a long time. Since maybe Mojave-ish time it's got significantly faster in my experience.

I'll test it now. For reference, I'm on Catalina so I no longer have "iTunes", but I have a <checks> 7.14TB "TV" library (556 movies, 4228 TV episodes); and a paltry 37.5 GB "Music" library (2734 songs).

I'm going to load the shared library for each on my iPhone 7, which has.. non-beta iOS is out I guess.


Ok the music library took 20.55 seconds from tapping the shared library name (under home sharing) until the shared library appeared.

The "TV" library timer stopped at 20.51 seconds but my reaction on that wasn't as good - I'd say it's probably closer to 20 flat or maybe even 19.something.

I guess the big question is what devices specifically are involved in your environment and what OS/Software versions are involved?

 

[VaZ]

My iTunes Home Sharing to iOS 13.6 devices stopped working. Crashes Music app after loading playlist.
Any solutions around this?

 

[pullman]

Unfortunately no idea beyond signing out an in again, rebooting etc. Perhaps best to start a new thread since this is off-topic from this one. Good luck

My iTunes Home Sharing to iOS 13.6 devices stopped working. Crashes Music app after loading playlist.
Any solutions around this?