Is there any way at all to make a home shared iTunes library load faster on iPhones?

Thank you for the reply. I thought as much because I have not seen any trick to fixing this.

I've tried 2,4GHz and 5GHz and both are equally slow. I've put the server Mac on a wired connection to the AEBS without improvement.

It's really a shame that Apple just leaves home sharing as a crippled solution with respect to iOS, esp when it really can't be rocket science to fix it.

I have found a solution. Home sharing works great on other Macs. On our MacBooks the shared library (20,000+ songs) loads within 15-20 seconds and plays without any problem at all over the AirPort Extreme everywhere in the house.

But home sharing, simply put, does not work on iOS. For our iOS units I have therefore had to resort to third party apps.

Before anyone removes this post, I submit that it meets the requirements of the Apple Support Communities Use Agreement, specifically because:

• "Submissions may contain information about products not manufactured by Apple" (section A.6),
• it references apps which are available on the App Store and, therefore, can be presumed not to "damage a user’s device, create a potential safety risk, or invalidate Apple’s limited warranty" (section A.6),
• it is constructive (section B.3) and not advertising (section B.6) and, finally because
• it helps "people use Apple products and technologies [i.e. home sharing] more effectively" (section B.1).

That having been noted, there are file explorers in the App Store which can play SMB shares. One that works well is called FE File Explorer, but there are other ones too. Another solution is to use VLC for Mobile to stream music, which appears to be equally stable.

While such solutions will load the library folder immediately, their drawback is that they don't feature a music player. It is not possible to queue up tracks or easily search by artist, album etc.

I then looked at music players capable of accessing SMB shares. Apple has a few in the App Store. I tried Flacbox before settling for Music Streamer which over the course of a few days' testing has proved itself to be reliable and easy to use. The library is instantly available, it plays iTunes' playlists, has a well functioning search function and a good queue-up function etc. It also finds connected bluetooth speakers which is important to me.

I still hope that Apple will eventually devote the presumably not immense resources needed to make home sharing - a fantastically useful technology - work on iOS. But until then the above is a solution that "just works".

Philip