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Remote Pairing

What Local Remote Control is

With Local Remote Control, your iPhone becomes a remote for muwav on your Mac. Play and pause, skip, seek, adjust speed, rate the current track, and toggle its waves — all from the couch, with the artwork right there on your phone.

Everything happens over your local Wi-Fi network. Nothing goes through the internet, and nothing goes through a server. Your Mac and your iPhone talk directly to each other, which is why they need to be on the same network.

What you need

  • muwav open on your Mac, with Settings → Remote → Allow control from iPhone turned on
  • muwav open on your iPhone
  • Both devices on the same Wi-Fi network

One iPhone can be paired with your Mac at a time.

Pairing for the first time

Usually you don’t have to do anything. Turn on the toggle on your Mac, open muwav on your iPhone, and the two find each other. If your iPhone spots more than one available Mac, it asks which one you meant.

To pair deliberately — or to pair a different iPhone:

  1. On your Mac, open muwav → Settings → Remote and leave that pane open. Your Mac only accepts new pairings while this pane is on screen; the rest of the time it only talks to the iPhone it already knows.
  2. On your iPhone, open muwav → Settings. Your Mac appears in the pairing list.
  3. Tap it. That’s the whole ceremony. Pairing a new iPhone replaces the old one — no need to unpair first.

You can give your Mac a friendlier name for this list with the Advertise as field on the Mac’s Remote pane — “🌊 Living Room Mac” beats a system hostname every time. Clear the field to go back to the hostname.

My Mac doesn’t show up

Work down this list — it’s ordered by how often each one is the answer:

  1. Same Wi-Fi? Check both devices. A phone that quietly fell back to cellular, or a Mac on ethernet attached to a different network, looks exactly like this.
  2. Is the Remote pane open on the Mac? For new pairings, your Mac is only discoverable while Settings → Remote is visible on its screen.
  3. Is the toggle on? Allow control from iPhone, same pane. The Status row below it should read “Advertising.”
  4. VPN or unusual network? VPNs on either device can block local discovery, and some networks (guest networks, hotels, offices) deliberately isolate devices from each other. Home Wi-Fi almost always works; conference-room Wi-Fi is a coin flip.

My iPhone sees the Mac but won’t connect

If your Mac was previously paired to a different iPhone (or to this phone before a reinstall), your iPhone may have been turned away once and it remembers that. It won’t keep knocking on a door that said no.

Two fixes, either works:

  • On your iPhone: Settings → Troubleshooting → Reset remote pairing. This clears the memory of Macs that turned it away.
  • Or simply pair fresh: open the Remote pane on the Mac and tap the Mac in your iPhone’s pairing list. This replaces the Mac’s existing pairing in one step.

The connection drops

Brief hiccups heal themselves — if the connection blips, your iPhone quietly reconnects within a few seconds and you’ll never notice. If you walk out of Wi-Fi range or the Mac goes to sleep, the remote disconnects, then reconnects on its own the next time both apps are open on the same network.

A note on requirements

Local Remote Control requires muwav for iPhone, available on the App Store.