Music breaks the ios remote app

Same here.

Once Home Sharing was turned on (not in iTunes/Music preferences but rather in the Sharing section of the System preferences) the iTunes Remote app sees the music library and all the playlists, titles with covers etc. but when you tap to play a song nothing happens.

I hope this will be fixed by an update soon!!!!

A new version of the iTunes Remote app was released yesterday that just works with Catalina. "What's New" says "Support for Apple Music and the Apple TV apps in macOS Catalina". I didn't have to go through any Home Sharing deactivation/connection.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-remote/id284417350

Your alternative is Swinsian. https://swinsian.com Although there is no iOS remote for it either, but at the very least, the UI is what the UI should be on iTunes. If you can't control your music from iOS, might as well find a better program.

Download the trial, and you'll see what the new Music App should be... you know... without Apple's never ending push to stream everything (and pay for it), and keep every document you own in their cloud(which you have to pay for). [unless you have less than 5Gigs of data].

That might fix it, but I rather hope they make the Music app backwards compatible with the Remote app as the Catalina update also broke the Airplay functionality from my Marantz receiver. I used to be able for skip/pause/play with my remote, but that's broken too.

So I'm guessing they simply didn't open the APIs for it in the new Music app.

I have the exact same problem - I have two Marantz receivers and it use to be so slick - I could control everything from my iPhone - I would play music across all speakers thru Marantz from my MacMini controlled by my iPhone - after upping the firmware on Marantz receivers and restarting several times I can now play music directly from my iPhone, but not from myMacMini - very frustrating.

Me too. This transition to home sharing is difficult. We used to be able to control music from any device. Now there’s this “Apple ID needs to be the same” on all devices; but there’s guest access on the desktop, which doesn’t seem to do anything as far as I can tell., nor does Family Sharing. Nothing “just works” anymore. I’ll wait a few weeks and hopefully this will sort itself out. But this sucks.

Some friends who did install the public beta have reported that the iTunes Remote app will work again with the Music.app in Catalina 10.15.2. They tested it in public beta 3 and 4 and it supposedly worked smoothly.

So it seems the wait for the fix of this broken connection may be over soon.

Thanks, this is music to my ears! I trust that I will be able to stream high res music once again. My current work around was to put all music on an iPad in lower quality bit rate in order to have access to the entire music library. A poor solution at best.

Just a few days after my last post it now is official. Catalina 10.15.2 has re-instated the ability to control the Music.app on your Mac with the iTunes Remote app on your iPhone/iPad/Watch.

There is one thing which may at first sight seems to be a bit counter-intuitive when setting up the connection between your iDevice and the Music.app on your Mac.

Up until High Sierra and iTunes the easiest way to connect iTunes Remote app with your iTunes library was with using/activating Home Sharing. This does not work with the Music.app in Catalina (at least not when I tried it).

In order to establish a connection between the iDevice and the Music.app on the Mac I had to deactivate Home Sharing in the iTunes Remote app on my iDevice. You can do that under Settings (upper right corner when you open the iTunes Remote app) Also I had to delete all previously established connections to any iTunes Library. You can do that under Edit (upper left corner in iTunes remote app).

Once you have done the above two steps you will see a new Setup Screen in the iTunes Remote app prominently offering you "Connect with Home Sharing" or "Connect manually" in smaller letters (sorry, I don't have English as my default language setting - so the real options may read slightly different). Here I had to tap on "Connect manually". Once I did that my iDevice appeared in the side bar of the Music.app on my Mac with a little iTunes Remote logo and I received a four digit code on my iDevice which I had to enter on the Mac. Now the connection was established.

One more thought on this:

Thinking twice it seems logical that Home Sharing has to be deactivated and can not be used to establish a connection between the iTunes Remote app and the Music.app on the Mac. Home Sharing on the Mac used to be activated or deactivated within iTunes and as such is obviously closely linked to iTunes and iTunes is no longer available in Catalina. Now in Catalina the equivalent of Home Sharing is called Media Sharing and this is not controlled within the Music.app but within System Preferences in the section Sharing. In addition, the iTunes Remote app also still needs to work with older systems still running on pre-Catalina versions of macOS with iTunes. There you will most likely still need to use the Home Sharing option.

So the problem of this seemingly counter-intuitive behaviour is more that we were so used to one thing that we did not really thought about the consequences of the transition from iTunes to Music.app and from Home Sharing to Media Sharing. Apple certainly could have documented this way better. Also it would be nice to see an update of the iTunes Remote app which gives you a bit more guidance in the setup procedure.

Thanks Moka, your analysis is correct. De-activating Home Sharing, and manually (re-)establishing a new connection made the connection between the iOS Remote and the Music app, just as you describe. Hence remote control from the iDevice works as it did with High Sierra.

There’s no excuse for this! I use Home Sharing and Remote all the time. This should have been resolved before release.

Thanks, but I just want to control my Macs music library remotely from my iDevice. Not more than that.

Well, it is impossible to do that with the new Catalina Music app.

... unless (or until) there will be an update to the Remote app. So let's wait and see.

Yes this is super frustrating. I use JUMP Desktops VPN to control iTunes right now to play my music out of my computer.