Home Sharing Useless on iPhone 4

Question

Once again, I'm taking time away from doing other things that I would prefer to be doing right now to lodge another complaint about iOS. Once upon a time, home sharing worked on the iPhone. It is no longer functional. I don't know which itteration of iOS or iTunes broke the chain (I'm using iOS 6 and iTunes 10) but like so many wonderful features Apple introduces to its customer base, it went from something spectacular to something not even worth using. My music library contains thousands of songs. I am the first to admit that it's a massive catalog and would be surprised to see any mobile device handle it with no hang ups. Yet, when Apple introduced home sharing via iOS, they demonstrated it was up to the task and it worked with few hiccups. Today, after numerous redesigns and updates to iTunes and iOS, my Time Capsule networked music library appears to be only good for playing through my Mac. I have gone full circle from being tethered to my Mac and syncing my iPhone packed with space limited smart playlists via a cable to enjoying smart playlists in their entirety streamed to my iPhone anywhere in the house to, once again, being tethered to my Mac and not even bothering to sync music to my phone anymore (with the acception of my workout mix, which is parked locally on my phone). Why did this happen? I have no idea. Where iPhone once managed to connect quickly to my Mac and stream music anytime and anywhere via my home network, it now hangs on initial attempts to connect and, when it manages to connect after numerous attempts, it sometimes appears to load a limited number of songs, artists, and albums available in my library. It also places songs in playlists that should not be there and disconnects from my network regularly. Finally, if I don't always remember to switch back to my iPhone library when I finish playing from my home shared network, there is **** to pay the next time I go back to play my workout mix (to the point where nothing plays until I reset the phone).
iTunes Match is not the solution. I tried it. While I think it's a woderful idea in theory, it's horrible in execution, especially if you have a large library. I have a fast enough broadband and WIFI connection to know that it should work, but it simply doesn't work.
I'm really only here to complain. I have learned not to expect a response from Apple or timeline for fixing the issue. I just want Apple to know that it's alienating some of its most loyal customers. For years, I used your products to keep myself and my media organized. I don't want to change that and do not look forward to changing it. Still, I was a PC user once and I can certainly go back to being a PC user again. The inconvenience of attempting to organize my files on a PC will be offset by the time saved not having to deal with features you introduce that only work some of the time. I'm begging Apple to STOP BREAKING THINGS THAT ARE NOT BROKEN and to GO BACK AND FIX THE THINGS YOU BROKE. I would much prefer that you concentrate on fixing these glitches than introducing useless new UI features like different shades of color at the top of the iOS task bar. I don't know how long I will give for some of these issues to be resolved. It may depend on how many times I have to take time out of my day to lodge yet another complaint on this forum about your numerous software glitches. In the end, I WILL give up and move on. It's sad because, once upon a time, I grew to love your company and products.
Someday, I'll take another twenty minutes out of my day to lodge a complaint about how unreliable WIFI syncing has become since it was first introduced.

Answer 1

I just tried this with my iPhone 4 and it also didn't work.  This is how it failed:
  - Select "shared".
- The "pie" start to grow, got to about 1/3, then crashed without
    bringing in the shared content.
- After that, the library appeared in list, but I couldn't select
    it at all anymore.
Then I tried it with my iPad.  The pie got to the same point, sat
there for a long time, then completed and worked fine.
I did a hard reset of the phone and tried again, this time it
behaved like the iPad and worked fine.
Not sure whether it was the hard reset or whether sharing with
another device "woke something up", but in any event it works
now and I can't get it to break again.
Note, I only use sharing for movies, since I have Music Match
(which works *great* for me, even on 3G).
Specs:
  Sharing: 2.7 GHz iMac i5, OS 10.6.8
  Clients: iPhone 4
              4th gen iPad
Everything (including iTunes) patched to the latest.