How to Share Your Music on MacOS Catalina
When macOS Catalina finally comes out, you will notice a number of big changes. One of the most memorable is Apple’s grandiose conversion of iTunes into separate apps for music, video, and podcasts. We love this move, but it raises several questions, for example, “How do you share media in your home?”
How iTunes Sharing Previously Worked
While using iTunes is awkward, it has an incredibly handy Library Sharing feature that makes it easy to share your iTunes library content with other systems on your home network. You just opened the app preferences, hit the big blue Share button, and let you copy. (When I was in college, this was the best and easiest way to discover the digital music board.)
ITunes also had a Home Sharing feature that allowed you to sign in to up to five other Apple devices using the same account as your computer and import media. In other words, it is a step up from simple sharing and streaming, hence the login limitation.
BTW, I understand that iTunes still exists on Windows (at the moment), so it might be a little unfair to talk about it in the past tense. I don’t think Apple is planning to spend a lot of time developing this app – at least I wouldn’t.
How sharing works in macOS Catalina
First, the library is no longer shared. Or at least you won’t find this setting in the new macOS Catalina music app. Some of the settings are very similar to iTunes, but the Sharing tab is no longer there.
You can still access shared iTunes libraries, but that ability is a little buried. Click the tiny drop-down arrow next to Library to access any other iTunes shared folders on your home network, such as Windows computers, non-Catalina Mac computers, or iTunes server running on a NAS.
To set up media sharing from macOS Catalina, you need to go to the Sharing section in System Preferences. There you will see the new media sharing service. Turning on Share Media with Guests enables the same library sharing you saw earlier in iTunes, and you can also turn on Home Sharing if you want to try it out.
While this step makes sense on paper, we suspect that most people are wired to look for music sharing options in their apps, not in their system settings. Some breadcrumbs would be nice in the Music app, but now that you know, you will never forget.