iTunes Remote 4+

What can I say other than how convenient to not have to sit at your laptop enjoying iTunes (at least all the time). If you wanted to have a rest or a lay down, you can now choose what music you want to play whilst being away from the laptop using your iPhone as a remote like you would do a remote for the tele. About the only thing it can’t do is turn your laptop off and shut it down, nor the switch at the wall. 😜.. a great addition to the ever expanding arsenal of apps and tech.

As the app is bugging me for a review, here goes.

Every time they mess with this, it gets worse. Now it seems to be unable to play most of my albums in the correct order - it even lists them on the screen with the track numbers in the WRONG order.

The sidebar of artists gets out-of-whack with the right hand pane showing the albums, so tap on one artist and get the preceding artists albums. Great. Bet you couldn’t have found that in QA.

Then there’s the Up Next which you tap on top right, it appears and then mysteriously a few seconds later it sometimes jumps to the top left of the screen (iPad version). What’s that about?

Still no return of the star-rating capability that was stripped out because, eh, who knows...MVP no doubt despite its previous existence.

No ability to access Apple Music being a subscriber - so playing an Apple Music playlist is impossible and if I want to play an album from Apple Music that isn’t in my library, I need to add it in my Music iOS app, then come back to the remote app (linked to my iMac), find the newly added album and play from there to get it streaming on my Airport Express. Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

Really Apple. Sort your QA and dev process and then maybe ask for reviews?

Couldn’t live without some form of remote to my iTunes but really, if another option existed, I’d be all over it.

Update: Cautiously optimistic as the option to add libraries (now ‘add a media library’) seems fixed in the latest update! Thank you Apple :)

This has always been a really useful app. Whether using an old Mac with iTunes or a Linux daapd server to host your library, Remote has a nice, streamlined interface and is simple to use. Unfortunately there are some glaring bugs (especially around adding libraries, which works fine on the first setup but not when choosing “Add an iTunes Library”). It would be great if Apple gave this app some tlc. Unfortunately they seem to be putting all their focus on the subscription Apple Music and abandoning those who’ve built up local collections of music.