Airplay to Airport Express still not working properly, now on Monterey

trehulka wrote:

You may be right that Apple‘s priorities shifted but then it‘s just about the protocol, right? If Airport Express says it supports Airplay 2 then it should work on all devices that support Airplay 2, among others that‘s my Mac M1 and my iPhone 11 Pro.

No disagreement there. However, based on my experience with Apple's enabling AirPlay 2 for the AirPort Express (firmware 7.8.x), it never worked correctly ... and I have done numerous data traffic captures that proved it (at least to me) with a number of Mac clients running macOS Mojave and upwards. So, from that experience, I'm confident that nothing will change on the AirPort Express side of the AirPlay streaming equation.

Both M1s that we have home have the same problem.

The AirPort Express did not change, nor did its firmware. The last firmware update for the Express was in June 2019 and I doubt that we will ever see another.

The issue appeared with M1 Macs. If a software fix becomes available, it will be on the M1 Mac(s).

Might be worth posting in the support forum for the MacBook Pro, noting that you have one of the newer M1 versions.

MacBook Pro

As you should know, Apple representatives are typically not present here at the ASC. We are just fellow Apple-product users trying to help.

With the fact that Apple dropped out of the networking hardware business in early 2018, I doubt seriously that they will do anything to update any of the AirPort base stations, including the AirPort Express, to resolve this. IMHO, it would require a hardware, not simply a firmware, update to resolve this issue.