iTunes Remote App no longer works properly. iOS 26, MacOS Tahoe

Well on Friday morning I took the plunge and started to undo the misery of Tahoe.

Late on Saturday afternoon my Music library was back in a fully useable state.

If anyone is considering doing the same I’d urge you to google the process of downgrading the OS by a bootable USB procedure.

Make sure you do a Time Machine backup to a fresh USB drive. I used this as a reference for what to re-install after the OS was downgraded. It took a good 15 hours to complete but it would I knew it would help me identify what apps I needed to re-install and also that my data was safe.

Make sure you have an “old” version (one created under Sequoia) of your music library file as the ‘upgraded’ Tahoe version won’t work. They are usually in a folder called ‘Previous libraries’.

Export your playlists to files - I forgot to do this but thankfully mine haven’t changed much since the Tahoe.

I then wiped my Mac mini using the bootable USB stick downgrade procedure, remembering to log out of iCloud beforehand. My experience was slightly different to the video I watched but essentially it was quite straightforward apart from a point where the Mac went into some kind of authorisation / registration procedure which no video seemed to mention. I just entered the information it asked for and clicked through it and restarted the OS install in recovery mode, it all went well after that.

I had my Apple Music folder on a separate SSD - so its folders were untouched by the downgrade / wiping. I used the option key whilst opening the music app and pointed the library selection to the one just before I opted to ‘upgrade’ to Tahoe (from the previous libraries folder). All my music was visible again.

I needed to re-import the albums that were imported after the Tahoe ‘upgrade’. I had to make a copy of the album folders (that needed importing again) from the Apple Music folder to a ‘reimport’ folder then I deleted those folders from the original Apple music folder. I simply copied the albums back into Apple Music by dragging and dropping. If you don’t delete the existing album folders Apple Music with duplicate the files with (1) post fixes. You might also see that the album artwork gets stripped, so it’s a case of adding it back.

Don’t forget to reimport your playlists. I only had one playlist different and I simply added the songs back into it.

…. and that was it! I’m back using Apple Music on Sequoia and the iTunes remote app works perfectly!

Thanks Apple for your non testing worthless OS. Tahoe will never get re-installed.

I tried removing the iTunes Remote app from my iPhone and re-downloading it, and re-pairing the iTunes Remote app with the four digit code, after which the Mac Apple Music app crashed, but when I reloaded it, the iTunes Remote app was able to connect to my library, but the problems persisted.

Set up the iTunes Remote app for Music on Mac

Switching to shuffle mode and reloading the playlist fixed the AirPlay problem and now it is playing more than one song from my playlist, just as Padwack reported. I then switched back to infinite repeat of the playlist and now it is playing more than one song and in order.

I found this to be the case as well. If you select the album or playlist from remote and press play on a track it will only play that one track and not play the rest of the album or playlist.

I have found that if you click the shuffle option on the album or playlist in remote it will play the whole album or playlist in its shuffled state.

I hope they fix this soon as it’s the main way I play music around the house.

The only work around I have found: If you use the search feature and search for an album and select it - it will play the album all the way through. For example: 1) Select "Search" 2) Search for "Aja" (assuming you have this album) 3) Touch the entry and you will see 2 buttons: "Play" and "Shuffle". If you hit play it plays through and you can skip forward, backward, etc. If you begin playing the album and you hit the link to see the track listing and you select a track further down the list - you are back to square one. You can't go forward, back etc. It is REALLY a shame this app keeps breaking. I have brought many people to the Apple ecosystem because of the music capabilities.

Please take the time to file a proper issue at https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/

From what I gather that's the best chance of this getting fixed.

This seems to be an issue with the Music app on MacOS 26 not accepting some of the commands. If I watch the traffic and try to "Play Next" or "Add to Up Next", the Music app returns a 404 error.

I have same problem although I figured out a partial fix. If I use my remote to go to a new playlist and click on the first song then it won’t play the next song. If you click the ‘play’ button on the top left of the page then everything works okay. Obviously not great if you decide to click on a particular song inside the playlist but for me that’s not something I do often. Mostly, I want to be able to change playlists with remote and now I can. I used to click on the first song out of habit, which as we know won’t work now after that song.

The iTunes remote app is suffering from long-term neglect, and appears to have been deprecated, probably because no one much in Apple corporate feels the need to use it. For those of us who like what it does (or, increasingly, what it used to do) this is hugely disappointing.

Along with other respondents here, I like to pipe music around the house from a static Mac that hosts my entire music library, stored on a local drive. This is a far better option than AirPlaying it from my phone and having the music interrupted by calls, text message alerts, random system noises and connectivity issues. It can be a brilliant way to wrangle your music collection, but the ongoing neglect is destroying its usefulness.

An iPad Mini on a little stand running the Remote app is how I liked to control things, but the iPadOS implementation of the app has suffered even worse than the iPhone version. In addition to the problems listed by other contributors here, there’s no PLAY control when you line up an album or playlist on the iPad, so it’s shuffle or nothing because you can’t manually add anything to Up Next. It’s a depressing shambles and I urge anyone reading this to complain bitterly about it on Apple Feedback. It might not stop the rot, but at least you’ll have had your say.

I have the same problem. Also, Airplay no longer works for me. The audio only plays through the computer speaker, even when I select another speaker via Airplay. I tried to report this problem to Apple Feedback but iTunes Remote is no longer listed as an iOS app, even tho it is still available in the App Store. The version is 4.5.1, but it is 5 years old. The app info page states that update provided support for Apple Music and the Apple TV apps in macOS Catalina. "Requirements" at the bottom says "iOS 11.4 or later", "Wi-Fi connection to Apple TV, Apple Music, or iTunes on a Mac or PC", "macOS 10.15.2 or higher for Apple Music and the Apple TV app", and "iTunes 12.8 or later is recommended for use with iTunes Remote". It was working fine for me with Sequoia, but appears to no longer work with iOS 26 and Tahoe.

OK, weird. Playlists always work perfectly. And, it is as you say when I select an artist, then an album and try to play the first song. However, if select album (not artist first) and click 'play' (not the first track) it plays and loads the "up next" completely and plays all the songs. I need to go back and try this under Sequoia. I was ready to deploy a music server running Sequoia to get around the problem with Tahoe and if it works completely with Sequoia I may still do that.

Maybe trying to reach out to support through getsupport.apple.com would be effective. Has anyone tried that?

Yes, several of us have already tried that. It falls upon deaf ears and nobody gets back. They know it’s a bug in the new Music app with Tahoe but nobody at Apple has the balls to come out and admit it. The previous version of Music under OS Sequoia worked fine with the Remote app and had no issues. The bugs only appeared in OS Tahoe. For a company that for years relied on IPods and iTunes libraries it’s pretty abysmal really.

mem10123 wrote:

Exact same problem for me, super frustrating.

Apple has I believe forgotten this app ever existed. I hope adding another reply in here might help the collective noise so they might realize they broke something that’s worked otherwise flawlessly for years for a use case there’s a group of people who love/need.

This is a user-to-user forum. Apple generally doesn't participate much except to moderate it. (I've never seen a post that seemed to be an official reply from Apple, unless it was to direct a customer to contact Apple directly – and even then, those posts are few and far between.)

So if you want them to hear "collective noise", you're probably going to need to use the Feedback page ...

I updated to MacOS27 (and IOS27) and so far the iTunes Remote App is working properly. I connected to my library and chose a playlist with about 20 songs. I am streaming it to seven airplay speakers and have it set to repeat play. It's been going about four hours. I plan to let it run for a whole day... I was ready to set up an M1 Air slabbook with Sequoia and move my whole library to it. Maybe I will still do it, but it can at least run GG for now if my test passes.

Still broken in OSX 27 and IOS 27. Safe to say Apple have dropped this App without the honesty of actually saying so.

After updating to Tahoe, I’m experiencing the same issue with iTunes Remote.

Not only is the “Next Track” button unusable, but what’s even worse is that I can’t adjust the playback position at all — every time I try, the song restarts from the beginning.

It’s incredibly frustrating and makes it almost impossible to enjoy music properly. Please fix this as soon as possible!