HomeKit/Siri control of iTunes home server?

[netdog]

I know that Remote.app will control a home iTunes server, but what about Siri and HomePod and HomeKit? Apple seems so intent upon pushing Apple Music (and it's low-fidelity Internet-dependent subscription-based content) that they aren't taking care of those of us who maintain large iTunes home servers.

Am I missing something? As best as I can tell, from what Apple has published, even HomePod is only really interested in letting you use Siri to access music if you are paying for a subscription to their service. It's that sort of revenue-stream dependent decision that often makes a company's offerings less than they could be.

 

[Aguaman]

Here are some Siri Shortcuts I've made that let you control iTunes on your Mac with Siri and stream the music to any of your AirPlay speakers...

https://techheroesinc.blogspot.com/2018/11/control-itunes-on-your-mac-with-siri.html

And we're waiting on HomeKit support, which I imagine is in the future (I hope). The way I see it, Apple has been going down a road of integrating iOS with the Mac (and visa versa), so predicting that we'll soon be able to use a Mac as an AirPlay speaker is not outlandish.

As far as "revenue-stream dependent decisions" go... You're at least partly correct. Basically, a speaker is a device that is designed to receive music from another device and output the sound. The HomePod follows that design except when paired with a cloud service like Apple Music or iTunes Match (at $25 per year it's a steal!). You can use Siri on any Apple device to stream music to the HomePod, but you can't use Siri on the HomePod to grab music from another device on your network and play it. In fact, you can't use Siri with any Apple device to grab music from another device (unless it's from a cloud service like iTunes Match). But I agree. It sure would be nice if Apple gave us the ability to use Siri to access our own music collections in iTunes on the Mac with any Apple device within our own home network.

Hey, thanks for making this comment! It prompted me to test out my iTunes shortcuts with the HomePod, and I discovered a quirk. The HomePod will activate my Siri Shortcuts and work fine UNLESS the shortcut requires input from the user. Stops it dead. It's odd behavior. I'd expect the HomePod to be able to receive dictation through it's mic and send it to the shortcut... but I guess not. Heading to Apple Feedback now... https://www.apple.com/feedback/

 

[d.steve]

At this point, I'm pretty much convinced that Apple isn't interested in improving things for iTunes Home Sharing. In the last number of years, the only thing I've noticed being added was artwork when browsing from AppleTV.

I think we're relegated to coming up with workarounds like Aguaman provided.