AirPlay music streaming stops between songs

I have fixed this problem by setting the crossfade to about 5 secounds. I don't know why, but it works.

this has been driving me mental. airplay works fine for me with iphone / ipad but my rMBP and wife's MBAir will mute the sound whilst continue to play in itunes - or occasionally just play very late - but continuing muted until one notices and restarts is the the norm. Never noticed before mountain lion. Our network is the latest Airport Extreme with ATV, ZepAir and one Airport Exppress in extend and speaker mode. Bandwidth over the network is very high and not the issue.

Recent 11.0 itunes update has done nothing to solve this problem. One can stream from and ipad/iphone but the reason i went for airport was to play music in sync in all rooms - which will usually work for no more than a song before it mutes.

Apple have broken Airport, broken multi-screen optimisation for over a year and Final Cut Pro X has been a massive ball of glitchy stress! It is not unreasonable for us to expect them to have addressed this by now - in the UK these devices are being and marlete with a feature set that is not realised in practice using all apple products in the most favourable of environments.

One thing i would like to add is that the Apple Airport Extreme does not even appear to be intelligent enough to do any quality of service prioritisation at all despite one assuming it would have been well placed to at least prioritise airplay traffic! - this became clear to me when my music start stuttering on one occasion and when i went to itunes i find it has just started syncing my ipad over wi-fi. Apple ipad, rMBP, AirporExtreme: no intelligence at all. The Airport Extreme therefore strikes me as a huge waste of money as high price is not justified in any way in higher performance and reliability.

mega rant over i'm off to play some vinyl! i usually get to this to three or more songs before i'm required take any action or investigation!

sorry for long angry rant - best luck with your airplays! ;-)

I've had this issue to the point of it not working since thanksgiving of this year. I made a lovely thanksgiving dinner playlist and it'd play no more than one song at a time. The iTunes on my 2009 MBP running mountain lion would simply not play the next song until I restarted the program. Prior to that it only happened once in a very long while.

Now, it happens all the time. Daily, really. To the point I simply can't rely on it. Here is what my research has turned up:

- iTunes ***** at managing large libraries.

- iTunes ***** at managing remote libraries.

- if your library is on a NAS drive, it might be because your NAS hard drive is spinning down, making it out of sync with your iTunes queue.

- Apple claims iTunes is not designed with this set up in mind.

- if you're using a NAS drive, the "twonky" system may be interfering with processing.

- the problem is more frequent with my Panasonic stereo than AppleTv. My stereo is on 2.5 ghz; AppleTV is on 5 ghz band.

Now, it seems the ideal set up is stationary device with all media stored locally. Second to that: stationary device with USB/thunderbolt/etc attached drive. I'm not sure why Apple won't support remote libraries since the very point of AirPlay is a distributed home-based cloud network and a dedicated apple fan could basically keep the system Apple branded at all relevant points.

I think it must be something to do with iTunes specifically. My iPad and 4S stream Internet radio and media stored on each device to my AppleTV and Panasonic stereo without issue. I've turned off Bluetooth and set my 2.5ghz wireless band (netgear b/g/n router) to channel 9. No relief. Changed my crossfade to 4 seconds. Listening to music on my MBP occasionally produces the same result, but far less frequently.

I plan on trying two new things today since I need this resolved for a big party next weekend:

1) no cross fade. It could be something is getting losses in the mix (literally).

2) loading my iTunes remotely from my iPad and 4S and streaming via AirPlay to my AppleTV and Panasonic individually.

I'll report back after.

So far, opening "Music" on my iPad -> going to "other" -> Shared -> my library has resulted in seamless AirPlay streaming of the same Playlist I had problems with this morning to both my AppleTV and Panasonic stereo (though not simultaneously). We're about 45 minutes into the playlist so far.

Update 2: I turned off my iPad stream and disconnected from the AirPlay device. I then loaded the same song from the same playlist on iTunes and it would not play at all. Rebooted iTunes and it started no problem.

Update 3: I turned off my Crossfade entirely. I had zero issue for about 5 or 6 songs. I then turned on my crossfade and set it to 2 seconds. I then let the song finish and the problem presented itself again. Hitting "next" resolved it.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the issue has something to do with the crossfading on AirPlay. My guess is that iTunes is dropping the audio feed between the application and outgoing signal when trying to drop the previous song and queue up the next song. Especially since as I watch the songs transition on the iTunes progress bar the counters seem to stop about 3-4 seconds before the song ends and I'm left wondering if it will freeze.

It can't be that because my crossfade has always been set to Off.

I never found the solution to that ***** problem, althought I have found a very good workaround. I use AirFoil to stream my music from iTunes (and other softwares). Songs always play, never cut out.

But it's a paid software....

I would prefer Apple to fix iTunes one day !

No you're right because I just ran out to the store for a few hours leaving my music running x-fade free and I came home to silence - the songs had played just fine in iTunes apparently.

Thanks for the advice, Sasutan! Turning on the crossfade solved the issue for me. My stream was dropping out every time a song would end. Although the music kept playing in iTunes, it was not transmiting to the Airport Express. It seems that a gap in the songs interrupts the network connection for some reason. I'm guessing the crossfade solves the issue by preventing any gaps from occurring and consequently keeping the network connection constant. My setup is an older Macbook Air with my iTunes library playing from a thumb drive.

Just updated iTunes last night with the latest version of 11 (not sure when Apple pushed it to us, but I assume this week). So far it seems to have fixed most of the 11's complaints, including the airplay compatibility.

Now if they'll just bring back iTunes DJ and song requesting!

Nevermind - AirPlay still drops songs. Even using "Up Next" causes songs to not queue up. I just renovated my house with AirPlay in mind and whatever this bug is has effectively rendered the past 6 months of work and wiring nearly useless.

x-fade worked for me. itunes 11.0.1.12. apple tv 3. music on NAS - smb protocol used for sharing. apple tv and nas on 1gb ethernet. itunes on laptop with wifi. issue observed only for 320 kbs music.

I was experiencing the same problem. It was really starting to annoyed me until I stumble on this tread. Airfoil fixed it for me, I think Apple really screwed it up this time.

Airplay via iTunes is still stopping arbitrarily in between songs. This doesn't happen when using airplay from iPhone or iPad. It happens when I beam from my Mac Mini via iTunes to my Airport Express. It will play for several songs, but it will eventually stop streaming by airplay, though it keeps playing in iTunes.

Still no improvement. I've actually had better luck importing my playlists into Spotify (which I hate). I'm holding off on purchasing my MacMini until I think this will work.

Same trouble.

Even when a song is not ended.

I have this configuration:

iTune library stored on a NAS Western Digital MyBook Live 2 TB;

Twonky Media Player active on the NAS to permit streaming on my Playstation 3.

iMac with Mountain Lion 10.8.2

Airport Extreme

iTunes 11.0.1

I stream everything to Bower & Wilkins Zeppelin Air.

No troubles in streaming from iPhone 4 with WD software like WD2Go.

Apple should really do something to fix this trouble. It's incredible and makes going crazy.