iTunes Airplay menu kills the network. Really.

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iTunes Airplay menu kills the network. Really.

I have a bizarre, ongoing problem accessing Airplay speakers from iTunes 12.9.2.5 on Mojave: every time I select an Airplay speaker from the list in iTunes it completely kills the network on the Mac. Whether it's on WiFi or Ethernet, the network completely drops for several seconds (see video here https://youtu.be/wqs2Mmmr5QQ). The console then fills up with all the messages you would expect (given the network just dropped), plus a lot of these messages:

error 18:37:30.876185 +0000 AirPlayXPCHelper endpoint_CopyProperty:1127: got error -12784/0xFFFFCE10 kCMBaseObjectError_PropertyNotFound

This happens on every Mac I've tried it on, across 2 locations (a total of 5 Macs).

If I try to access the same speakers (a mix of Airplay 1 & 2 devices) from iOS (iPhone, AppleTV) everything works perfectly. It's 100% rock solid.

I first noticed the issue in September, around the time Mojave was released. Before that it was totally solid on MacOS too.

Anyone else seeing this? Any ideas on what the issue is?

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jan 16, 2019 10:47 AM

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Answer 1

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duttonst2

Level 1

14 points

Feb 28, 2019 6:14 AM in response to Andy987

I've found the following workaround works reliably, but it requires that you have at least one old Airplay 1.0 device hanging around (e.g. original Airport Express or Apple TV v2/v3):

Disable "AVB/EAV Mode" on your ethernet adapter
Select one or more Airplay 1.0 devices from within iTunes, in addition to your Airplay 2.0 devices

Step 1 stops Airplay from killing the network. Step 2 seems to kick iTunes into some kind of backwards-compatible "Airplay 1" mode which doesn't require AVB to be working. Put both together and everything seems to go back to normal.

Can't believe this hasn't been fixed by now (and yes I've reported it as a bug as well).

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Answer 2

Andy987 Author

Level 1

10 points

Feb 17, 2019 8:42 AM in response to Andy987

Am updating this in case anyone else experiencing the same issue comes across this thread.

This appears to be a genuine bug in Mojave and seems to impact anyone who uses ethernet to connect their Mac to Airplay 2 devices instead of WiFi.

Specifically it looks like the "AVB/EAV Mode" option in network preferences/advanced/hardware is triggering the problem, since if you disable this then the behaviour disappears (although so does the ability to connect to speakers at all, unfortunately)

In fact the issue has already been reported here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8497345 and I find it strange that more people aren't reporting it.

The workaround suggested in the thread above (enable WiFi and put it above ethernet in the service order) improves things a bit but is obviously less than ideal given that WiFi is slower, less reliable and uses-up spectrum.

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iTunes Airplay menu kills the network. Really.

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