Q: home sharing on iPhone: library loads but won't play just scrolls through songs

Ereshkigal, I have an iPad 1 running 5.1.1 but the "more" button steadfastly refuses to give me a homesharing option despite managing to do it in my iPhone 5s. What am I missing - I just assumed it was old and knackered but you have re-ignited the dream!

I have the same issue. Half the time I can't connect but when I do it just scrolls and scrolls. I updated to 7.1.1 but no use. ATV works fine just the pad and iPhone are having the problems. Oh and it's not the network as this is working fine

I have the same problem. I have windows 8.1, ipad 2 with 7.1.1 and itunes 11.1.5.5. One of the big selling points of my Ipad purchase was to have access my pc's 200 GB music library in different parts of my house, but after a long time the library loads but won't play any songs. I can see the songs but the device can't play them. Its been like this for awhile and annoys me to no end. I finally decided to join the list of complaints here to get more attention from apple to fix this.

I don't know what to tell you - it just works every time on my iPad 1st Gen and rarely if ever on my iPod 4th Gen, iPhone 4, iPhone 5 and iPad 2nd Gen. 

It is certainly a later version software issue, as another iPad 2 Gen that is not yet updated loads and plays the library just fine. 

As for your comment, dadarulz, I really don't think that Apple read what is written here and even if they did, they don't care one bit.  Steve Jobs might have done, since he had a laser-like focus on quality and perfection, but he's gone and the rest of them could not give a ****.  That much is evident.  This is an easy fix, so why has it not been done? 

Instead, it rapidly skips to the next consecutive song and doesn't stop.

This.

One thing I've realized today was this simple detail:

My iPhone 5s was set to Auto-Lock after 2 minutes while my music library was still loading up.

After letting it fully load without my iPhone going to sleep or switching menus I was finally able to play my tracks without any issues.

I also have an iPhone 5s with the latest iOS 7.1.1 update. It'll do the same behavior with skipping tracks if I let my iPhone go to sleep while it's still loading my library over Wifi -- my library's well over 400GB so it does take some time to load. It simply plays and stops a track instantly as if there were something wrong with the audio file itself. I'm sure Apple Engineers and others may assume the average user has a bad music library with rotten tracks (it happens), but it's not the case here.

To me it sounds like a bug. If I let my iPhone go to sleep whilst in the middle of loading my massive library and then wake it up it seems like it tries to pick up loading where it left off. Perhaps this is where the data gets corrupt somehow, however that's the extent of my troubleshooting. I also have an iPad 1st generation and have never experienced any issues with loading my Shared library on it either. Then again it doesn't go to sleep when this happens (longer Auto-Lock duration).

Can anyone else try this out and confirm please? Thanks!

Liquid, I think you're on to it. I tested this on my iPod Touch last night and got the results you did. If I set Auto-Lock to Never, the shared iTunes library loaded and played properly.

It appears that switching to another app before the shared library has completely loaded produces the same result as letting Auto-Lock interrupt the loading process. When I return to the Music app, it resumes loading the shared library, but then attempting to play any music results in Music rapidly flipping through tracks without playing anything.

So, any kind of interruption of the loading process seems to produce the bad result. Surely, this could be fixed.

BTW, the Music app no doubt is reading the iTunes library file, or probably the library.xml file. The size of these is measured in MB, not GB.

But, no matter, I commend you for identifying the problem that at least some of us are having. Thanks!

This worked for me to, i have 120 gigs of music and something around 25k songs in my library, but a soon as the music started playing (instead of skipping) the music app crashes. Has anyone with a large music collection experienced the same?

I too tried this, but to no avail.  I have given up trying to make this work on anything other than my 1st Gen iPad, which was not being used for much in any case and now that is my way of accessing music from my library. 

I fail to see why users should have to troubleshoot issues that lazy Apple engineers ought to have fixed already.  Thus, I don't bother and will probably use my cheap Chinese Android tablet, which also plays FLAC files.

I have run into the same problem with iTunes 11.2.2.3 on Windows 7, both with iOS 7.1.1 and iOS 7.1.2. I finally found a series of steps that restores everything without rebooting my computer or phone. As near as I can tell, iTunes and its services on Windows loose track of things. So the solution is to:

1. Exit iTunes (by closing it properly if you can, killing if you cannot).
2. Use TaskMgr to kill iTunesHelper.exe (if there s a polite way to do that, I have not found it)
3. Stop the following services (either from Services manager or on a command line prefixed with Net Stop:
   1. iPod Service
   2. Bonjour Service
   3. Apple Mobile Device Service
4. On your iPhone, kill the Music app (i.e. dbl click home button, find the music app and swipe up to force it to exit).

Now you just perform the reverse of 1 - 3 and in reverse order:

1. Net Start:

1. iPod Service
2. Bonjour Service
3. Apple Mobile Device Service

2. Start iTunesHelper (on my computer it is found at "C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunesHelper.exe". Generally it is found in the same directory as iTunes,

3. Start iTunes (again, in my case: "C:\Program Files (x86)\iTunes\iTunes.exe".

Order may or may not be important. This order works for me, but I lack any data to say why... except that it does, If you find a better order, I'd love to learn about it.

And then open the music app on your iPhone. This works for me every time and, with the Windows script I wrote it goes pretty quickly. Be sure you stop all the services first and then restart them one after the other. Seems like there is something funky happening when a thread or process (or, I guess, sharing client) goes away or stops performing. By cleanly stopping then restarting the service components and iTunes, it seems to clean up as well as a reboot. This looks like poor handling of process  in the  thread  or process attach/detach methods for these services... though it is quite hard to be sure without debugging the whole thing.

Happy to share the script if there is interest. Please note that it also requires a few script-support console apps I've written. No extras needed to follow the above steps beyond your computer and a working knowledge of the Services Manager screen,

I hope the helps others save from rebooting on Windows (or from searching for hours for a solution). Sorry, but I don't know what the equivalent steps are for OS X (and maybe the 7.1.1 update made all of that moot).

Cheers...

- dennis

Same thing happening to me.  iPhone 6, iOS 8, OS 10.9.4

when auto lock is off, it works fine.  seems to me that they should have fixed this in the new iOS

I'm having the exact same problem. Library loads up (taking forever) and then when I tap a song it scrolls through the album and stops.

OK tried tudes 111 advice above. Shutting the auto shut off while its syncing fixes it. Weird, it should work in the background no?

I had the same problem.  When you select home sharing on your iPhone and select the computer, a circle appears that slowly becomes bolder as the connection is made.  When the circle is completely bold you have to wait until the circle disappears, replaced by a check mark.  If you don't do this, you will experience your problem, the scrolling through song titles which defaults then to the album.