Airplay audio cuts out intermittently

Thank you so very much for this advice. i have never tried a soft reset. What does work is de-selecting the respective express's in airplay while on iTunes then re-selecting them. But that is a pain in the rear several times a day...I will try the soft re-set. If that does not work i will spend the money on the gigabit switch and run cat 6 cables to my express's and my apple tv's. If it still occurs i guess i will try to determine if there is an issue with my airport extreme - although i know nothing of running diagnostics on it. thank you again for yoru help

good luck with it. don't forget the firmware updates as well. one issue i remember when i ran my cat cables to the expresses had something to do with running (or not) in bridge mode. the expresses come factory set which i had to change in order to get my network to work. i'm not a techno wizard either but i have always found help somewhere other the people that create the stuff.

Yes. I've found that if you devote yourself wholly to making airplay work, it will do so loike a charm. But this has meant, to me:

1. Airport Base Station for your router and if you have any bridges, they must be airport base stations or expresses

2. Replacing ALL older switches with gigabit rated ones

3. Closing all airplay connections as soon as you stop using them

Having done this, I'ce found Airplay has made my home audio/video really magical. Now that Nenon has airplay-certified receivers, I can start a song from anywhere in the huse on any idevice and have it play in bedroom or living room. pretty cool, and a lot cheaper than old-fashioned alternatives.

Thank you Mr. Johnson. I do indeed have an extreme for my router and express's and apple tv's only in my system. Now that i am thinking about hardwiring the apple tv's and expresses i will need a gigabit switch to connect to my Airport Extreme. Bootsmon from above reminds me when i do in fact hard wire the expresses i will need to make sure they are set to a direct ethernet cable connection as opposed to "wireless" connection to the Airport Extreme. I have had great sucess thus far with my endeavor to have music throughout my home. Thank you for taking time to advise me

Bootsmon can you explain about the firmware updates and the exact procedure for "soft reset". I fully intend to wire my home but in the meantime i would like to make sure my firmware is up to date and i do in fact "soft reset" my expresses. Thank you again for helping me.

there is a reset button on the bottom of the express where the Ethernet and speakers etc hook-up. take a paperclip point and depress the button quickly for the soft reset. if you press and hold the button you will do a factory reset which means re configuring the express to your system.

as for the firm ware you will need to open up airport utilities in the utilities application. i'm running OSX 10.7.5 which gives a nice schematic of your setup. it had a red number beside each express and my extreme. if you click on the device it should tell you if a firmware update is available. when i did mine one of them got stuck when downloading but i just kept powering things off and they all eventually uploaded.

if you live in a big house you will probably want to go Ethernet at some point just to get around interferences. good luck with it.

Got it Botsmon i am in fact going to hard wire my express' and apple tvs. not because of a large home but just because i have read that ethernet cables are the best way to go period. thank you again for all your help

Not to discourage you, but my whole apt is wired with Cat6 wiring, I have an 2 AppleTVs in living room/bedroom and airport express (just as an audio receiver) in playroom while streaming audio from Airfoil on PC. What's ticking me off is that I'm still getting some stuttering in my audio which I find very annoying.

I've tried making all Airfoil related processes run in HIGH or REALTIME in the Task manager, but this doesn't seem to have much of an effect.

I'm now trying to figure out what else could be slowing the network or my computer down. I turned off my online backup (backblaze) and that seemed to help a bit...but I'm leaning towards repalcing my Netgear 100/1gb dual band router that I bought 3 years ago.

Any other thoughts out there?

(And if you say "Buy a mac".........GRRRRR ;-)

i've had dropouts/skipping for years playing audio with iphone 4,4s and now 5 using airplay to my sonus speakers.

i use time machine and an airport express.

Tried opening airport utility in my imac and keeping it open(also have it minimized). So far it's like a miracle. NO dropouts for over and hour so far. They used to come every few minutes. Tested on Spotify, Pandora , and apple music app. All working great!

I was experiencing a similar problem. I was streaming from my 2012 iMac running Mountain Lion (10.8.3) to my 2012 Airport Express running firmware 7.6.3 via my Linksys E3200 Wireless-N router running firmware 1.0.04. At the time of writing, all of these are the latest versions of software/firmware. I would get horrendous stuttering going from iTunes via airplay. It also seemed to jack with the Linksys, causing it to be unresponsive and occasionally need to be rebooted.

Funny thing was, I could stream just fine from an iPhone or iPod Touch.

What finally seems to have solved it for me was to completely disable ipv6 on my Mac. After doing this, I haven't heard a stutter yet.

In order to disable ipv6 in OSX, you have to open a Terminal window (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal) and issue the following command:

sudo networksetup -setv6off Wi-Fi

<enter your administrative pasword at the prompt>

There does not appear to be a way to do this from System Settings. After issuing this command, if you go to Network Settings -> Advanced for your wireless connection, you will see in the TCP/IP section that ipv6 is now listed as "Off", which was not an option presented previously.

I can't explain why this works, I just know that it worked for me.

Hope it helps.

@Derek92, I'm going to try your fix; I've got exactly the same problem. Since I don't run IPv6 anywhere, it seems an easy thing to try. Just out of interest, would the command to re-enable IPv6 be something like:

sudo networksetup -setv6automatic Wi-Fi

Also, since I have this problem with wired Ethernet, I should probably do this:

sudo networksetup -setv6off Ethernet

Yes? No?

@Morbific, yes that should re-enable ipv6.

I've also heard from one person that toggling ipv6 off and then on will fix this problem. Since I'm not running ipv6 anywhere, I'm just going to leave it off for now.

I am interested to hear that you have this problem on ethernet as well. Lends more credence to a protocol problem than to a link/bandwidth issue.

It does look like the command you've used to disable for ethernet is correct as well.

Good luck, and let me know if it works or not!

Ok, so what I have to report so far:

1. I've been using this for about 4 hours now without a skip.

2. This wasn't true initially as I was still getting drop outs; after disabling IPv6, for whatever reason my Ethernet interface started flapping. I've nailed it up (turned off auto-detect for duplex) which seems to have fixed it.

Previously it would skip like a schoolgirl with a jump rope, so this is definite progress. Thoughts...

a) Once I've run this a few days to bed it in, I'll try re-enabling IPv6 and see what happens.

b) It's odd that disabling IPv6 would cause a different network problem (autonegotiation issues) to occur. Might be something peculiar with my switch, who knows.

c) It really shouldn't be this hard! 🙂

Thanks for your help Derek - you're a lifesaver. This was driving me mad, I really appreciate you posting the fix here. I hope Apple read these forums so they can punt this up to a code guy working on network drivers in OS X.

OK. I as streaming music via Airplay to ATV3. It drops connection every few minutes. I have read this and other threads about this, and have done the things people recommend: I threw a 13 days old chicken over my left shoulder, spit 3 times to the East, dances the Airplay-dance and sacrificed an old modem to the iGod. Still no luck. Is Apple support reading these pages, or are they busy sueing the world? Just frustration. Nothing seems to work...

I tried this: Turning off IPv6, keeping the Airport utility open, setting the AirPlay speaker stream to multiple, ensuring my Mac, wireless router and speakers are within reasonable ranges from each other, connecting my Mac (which in my case is the source from which I stream music from) physically with an ethernet cable to the router... none of these worked in fixing the drops; and all my hardware, firmware and software are of the most resent available. What finally did work, and I mean 100%! Have not had one drop since I made this final change: Modified the Radio Mode wireless setting to an option other than automatic on the main wireless router, in my case an Airport Express. I now stream flawlessly and simultaneously to an Apple TV which is connected to a 4 speaker wired amplifier, 2 Zepplin Air speakers and an A7 speaker, filling 3 rooms with the same, perfectly streamed music. My nightmare is now over!