Home Sharing could not be activated (error 5506)

Having the same problem now, did you find a solution?

I ran into the same problem as well. Resolved by authorizing the newly created Apple ID account to the iTunes library you're trying to "Home Share". Enjoy!

I just bought a new laptop.I already had home sharing setup between 3 computers.I tried to add my new computer using the same appleid I used for sharing before but I receive this 5506 error saying home sharing culd not be setup. Any ideas for this circumstance?

Never mind - I activated the appleid on this new computer inthe applestore and then home sharing worked correctly. Sure would help if theerror message was a little more helpful.

Except that doesn't work if you want to activate your new Apple ID and use it for Home Sharing but do not want to provide any credit card information to the iTunes store. It seems that Apple has decided to remove the "None" as a payment option in the iTunes store if you try to use your new Apple ID to sign in to the iTunes store so that you can use this Apple ID just for Home Sharing.

I have to say that parenthetically, this whole notion of requiring an Apple ID for "Home Sharing" is really a bad design decision on Apple's part - it is conflating tow unrelated things - sharing media from computers on your home network with each other and with devices like Apple TV and the business of buying/renting content from the iTunes store. Me feeling is that this tie-in is intentional on Apple's part since they want to make it easy for anyone on your home network to buy iTunes content so they require a payment method be setup for the Apple ID used for Home Sharing.

It is a big PITA to do this without tying your Home Sharing Apple ID to your real iTunes account that has a real source of funding attached to it. Basically you follow this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2534

Having this be an official Apple support article makes me wonder if Apple got a whole lot of complaints from people that don't want to connect a credit card to an iTunes account so Apple created this back door as a way to do that. Not sure why they can't just allow an Apple ID to be created and used with iTunes for Home Sharing without requiring the user to supply payment information. Seems like maybe the Apple ID and iTunes Store and Home Sharing teams don't talk to each other. Oh right, it's Apple - they don't talk to each other.

I love Apple stuff - been using it as both a consumer and a developer for many years, but this whole recent mess with abandoning the Apple TV Gen 1 and then coming up with Apple TV Gen 2 and then only supporting Home Sharing with all the crap you have to go through to just do basic sharing and the inability of the Apple TV to do more than one Home Sharing account is really starting to wear on me.

thanks... i was about to grimace and type in the credit card details but this saved me. agree that making you go through the apple ID rigamarole (let alone giving up a credit card number) to share your own music with yourself is BS.

my problem is that i log into home sharing on my mac and my windows pc and then when i log into home sharing and i click done the home sharing symbol goes away and i cannot share my library from my mac to my pc and i just got 77 new songs on my mac and i really want them on my pc so i can put them on my ipod and this problem is making me really mad cus it is not working so if anyone has the answer please help me