AirPlay music streaming stops between songs

It does indeed defeat the whole point.

I have also noticed lately that the problem persists two ways. If I play the music from my Macbook and Airplay to the Apple TV then at various unpredictable moments, a song will appear to be playing but no sound occurs. Also, if I go to the Apple TV and choose my Mac library via home sharing, then eventually the same thing happens.

For the record, I have a very large, Apple lossless library of music stored externally on a NAS. Every possible connection is ethernet wired, so I feel I have eliminated wireless issues as the source. The problem is Apple software.

Very disappointing that Apple has not addressed or even acknowledged this very common problem, through several iterations of operating system and iTunes. There has to be some alternate way of playing your music that actually works as advertised.

If you want an alternative you could try Airfoil, it allows you to stream to airplay speakers. There's a remote app for it also, called 'reemote', and you'll also need 'reemote server' to allow the app to work. It's not as simple as airplay and you can't browse your files from the app like you can with the apple remote app, but it works and it allows you to stream any sound from your mac, not just stuff being played in itunes. You can choose where the input sound comes from, so you could choose itunes, or line-in or your internet browser etc. I have my record deck wired up to my imac and use airfoil to stream music from it to speakers in other rooms.

A new thought: could recent updates to the software have increased the bandwidth required for functional streaming? Because lately my router seems to be overwhelmed when doing airplay. The whole network slows, my Remote Apps have significant lag when trying to change songs, etc. It might also explain why it happens regardless of NAS or internal HDD, wifi or wired: the Router is still the common choke point for all things.

Doing more housework today, streaming to a panasonic stereo and appleTV. Let's see how it goes.

I'm not sure the router is the problem either, my bandwidth monitor shows that streaming music to my appletv uses on average about 130 KiloBytes per second. The router happily handles way more data than that when, for example, backing up to an external network drive....in then uses anything up 5 MegaBytes per second. If the router couldn't handle the streaming data then you would get random drop outs and stopping then starting again...which I sometimes do get when I'm doing lots of bandwidth intensive tasks at the same time. The problem here is pausing of tracks always at the same point, with 2 seconds left of the track.

A choking router also wouldn't explain why this problem seems to happen between itunes and the appletv, but not other airplay devices.

Sorry - I haven't read through all posts on this thread yet but thought I'd add in the symtoms I'm experiencing in case it sheds more light on the flaky Airplay issue.

My DENON AVR-2312 just drops Airplay at random times, incuding in the middle of songs. Every time I have to physically disconnect the AVR from the router and reconnect to resolve this fault.

Everything is on ethernet so cannot be wireless interference. (Although that being said I've all but given up on wireless Airplay streaming Spotify premium via my iPhone 4 as it drops after EVERY song!!!)

Initially I thought it was the Denon AVRt but I've found that the new LG Micro HiFi unit also drops off Airplay at random, so the common denominator is either router and/or interference from NAS drive (which uses Twonky DLNA Server). I'm more leaning towards router behaviour being th eproblem, based on these observations:

• I noticed today that the Airplay from my PC's iTunes drops at the same time as I hear the NAS drive spontaneously starts up - something that occurs periodically even though I'm not accessing the drive. To further validate the theory that this spontaneous NAS access drops the Airplay, I'll switch off the NAS for a while and see if Airplay runs uninterrupted for the duration.
• I also noticed the other day that as the LG device connected wirelessly to the network it kicked the DENON off Airplay. Once the DENON was disconnected and reconnected both devices could be streamed to simultaneously from iTunes playing content from my local HDD (I don't use NAS Drive for music).

My modem/router is Thomson TG782T supplied by Tel$tra Bigpond as part of package. I expect it's a cheap model.

I'm now wondering if I bridged the Thomson to just function as modem and got a better router whether it would resolve the issue.

I know for a fact when the stream drops midsong it's my router. I was mindlessly browsing gifs on reddit yesterday and each time a big one loaded my stream dropped until the gif completed its download. As for the issue after each song, still a mystery.

Not sure if this is relevant but I bought some new tunes from iTunes yesterday ... they played one after the other just fine. When I went back to content that wasn't from iTunes store then it was stopping again at the end of the song ? Weird co-incidence or something else ?

Just wanted to update my situation for others that find this thread via search

My problem was/is AirPlay has no sound but plays from start of track when using multiple speakers - this happens after playing other tracks successfully. This is unrelated to skips/dropouts which I assume would be a network/bandwidth/resource issue.

Machine with problem has windows xp with latest iTunes - I am airplaying to speakers connected through a 2nd gen Apple TV - all devices are wired to each other (though multiple airports are in play)

My music collection is mostly on a NAS with some on local drive

Thanks to a suggestion from this thread this problem resolved 90% of the time after enabling cross fade in iTunes.

I have determined the times it reoccurs after enabling cross fade is only when a playlist has songs on both my NAS and my local drive and it switches btwn the 2.

Workaround for me is to make sure file location on playlists are consistent - NAS only or local drive only. Problem then never occurs.

If for some reason I absolutely need a playlist that has both -- I am now an iTunes Match user. I use a different computer that has this playlist as iCloud/match - problem does not occur.

I hope that helped move someone further along out there. I've learned to live with the bug this way as I'm betting they'll never fix it.

Very interesting. My situation is very similar to yours except *all* my music files are on an external NAS. In fact, I recently ran Consolidate on my full library of 78K tracks, just to ensure they were stored consistently. However, one earlier poster stated they had this issue when playback switched from their purchased iTunes songs to content from a different source, which makes me wonder whether the culprit could be the file format. I have mostly custom-ripped Apple lossless tracks from CD's but intermingled are various formats of iTunes purchased songs and even a very, very few MP3's. Perhaps switching codecs on the fly somehow contributes to this issue?

@nerfTractor I'm starting to come to that conclusion ... I also have all my tracks on a NAS (although I pale into comparison with only 7k tracks!) but it does seem that might be a leader into the issue of it stopping playout on the AirPlay destination device at the end of the track despite it still showing to play on the computer ...

I did used to have Apple TV problems but I never connected it to this. When connected/playing through a computer running iTunes, music would sometimes stop playing - I always thought it was coughing on a missing track that was in my library (because it always happened in general shuffle never playing a playlist). Now that I'm a Match user that issue has become irrelevant (which I realize is not a workaround for you at 78k tracks).

Interesting theory about codecs. I do think it's meaningful almost everyone with this problem (that's actually having *this* problem) is using a NAS. My only file formats in my collection are mp3 and mp4 (but not lossless) so if that is also an issue I wouldn't be running into it.

Message was edited by: assorted (for spelling)

What's really strange is that this is not a "missing song" issue, in the sense that I don't ever see the 'exclamation mark' icon next to the problem track. If I just hit Previous to return to the beginning of the song, normal playback begins. So the track is there and iTunes can locate and play it... just not in uninterrupted sequence.

I used to post on this and other threads continually about this issue. This was an ongoing, frustrating experience for me, the dropouts at parties and dinners. However, since the latest updates to OS X and Apple TV, which took place a month or two ago, I have not experienced even one dropout. Not one. Are you all updated all around? It seems to me that this issue has been rectified. I stream from a Mac Mini to Apple TV and Airport Express stations around the house. Knock on wood, but it seems to finally be working the way it should.

No...seriously...the trouble is still there. No way. everything is updated....but dropouts are always with me....in the middle of the song...or at the end of it...randomly.

And be sure that this is really awfull when yoou bought a Zeppelin Air of Bower & Wilkins just to use the airdrop function.

Really disappointed by Apple....

If anything it's worse. Not only do I always update software as soon as it's released, I have updated hardware, too. Now using a 3TB Time Capsule, Macbook Pro Retina and Apple TV 3. Changed ISP's in there, too, and always the highest available broadband throughput, not that that really affects intra-LAN performance. Same sorry performance across the board. Only now, songs will skip in the middle, halt randomly in mid-cue or just go into beach-ball "loading" mode with no warning or means to reconfigure. You rewind or fast forward and the software figures it out. But just playing your music uninterrupted? Forget it.