Airplay audio cuts out intermittently

Hi. I have been using the Airport Express in my bathroom for 4 years, and with only minor drop outs. I have music stored on my PC in iTunes, and have two airport express units added to my wireless network on a Netgear router.

There are never issues when using Remote to play, but I dont want my PC on all the time, so really want to use airplay from my iPhone5 without issues. Unfortunently when playing the music in the livngroom airport express, I expereince drop outs every few minutes.

I am not much of an expert, tried few of the things in the forum but didnt help. Anyone more expereinced can say what would actaully help? connecting airport express by cable to the router? change some settings on the router or the airport express unit? thanks!

Bart

After searching for hours with no solid answers to this problem other than run the Apple TV on 5ghz and your devices on 2.4ghz (which isn't a solution, just a work-around) I went back to playing around with my wifi settings...

And voila, I disabled "Enable WMM (Wi-Fi multimedia) settings" in QoS setup and everything now WORKS on 5ghz!!!!

Not sure if my problem is related or not.

I am with Comcast internet provider and they sent us a new wireless router a Arris Group, Inc router TG862G/CT and now my airport express, while streaming music, drops music a few times per song. I can see the flashing light on the APE go from green to yellow during the drop out. Any idea how I fix this?

I recently wiped my Macbook and reset my APX (Airport Express) for various reasons and set everything up again.

All my Airplay problems returned.

It was only this morning that I remembered what I did the last time to cure these ills so I feel it is worth mentioning again.

Following reset of the APX, the range of addresses was using Apple's 10x default. This, surprisingly, seems to be the core of the problem.

I simply changed the range of addresses to 172.xxx and now I have no dropouts once more -at ALL.

Can you please be more specific?

Where in the Airport Utility is the setting for the "address range" to which you refer?

Under the "Internet" tab, there is a setting that defaults to 10.0.1.3 for the IpV Address and 10.0.1.1 for the DNS Servers? Is this the setting you changed? If not, where in the Airport Utility did you access the seeting?

Thanks,

C

On my Airport Utility, I simply went to the Network tab and then clicked on Network options. In there, I remembered what I had done before (possibly mentioned that some time back in this very thread) and changed the range to 172.xxx. I think a similar result can be achieved in changing to 192.xxx but I couldnt be bothered with any more fiddling. Once this change had eliminated the dropouts immediately, I left it, shut down Airport Utility and am enjoying uninterrupted music to 5 x APXs and 2 x ATV.

Interestingly, now, after disconnecting & reconnecting to my 5GHz network, I no longer get the 'Network connection timed out' error (IPv6 is still off), and instead Airplay goes back to acting like it did before when the Mac is on the 5GHz network-- constant dropouts. Again, more silence than actual music (it's that bad).

I had a setup that worked perfecly for a couple of years, with a mac mini running hard wired to a router that also had wireless, with the express linked by wireles.

Then after some mix of OS, iTunes and express firmware updates it started having this intermittent problem.

Then, I tried everything. Using all ethernet hardwire, upgrading router to latest time capsule, getting the latest airport express, nothign made any difference. I could airplay to the ATV no problem-- but the audio is degraded because it resamples, so that was not ideal.

Finally after returning the new express, trying hardwire again, ipv6 off etc etc, I tried the firmware downgrade on the express that does the audio to my high end system. From 7.6.4 -> 7.6.1. (in the new airport utility, option click the version number in the aiport's info panel).

Now it works again no problem. The problem was never bandwidth it seems, for me, but something about how the airplay sync is working for audio in firmware 7.6.4.

Another data point - I have an appleTV 2 and airport extreme, connected wirelessly. My iOS devices can stream just fine, but streaming from either my 2012 MacBookPro running 10.8.5 or my macbook air running 10.8.5, is just rife with cutouts - 10 seconds on, 5 seconds off and completely unlistenable. This is true whether I use airplay mirroring or just send mthe computer's audio by option-clicking the volume control. Tonight, I was busy with something, so rather than giving up in frustration I left it playing for a few minutes. When the apple TV dropped into its screensaver, it immediately stopped cutting out and started working just fine. When I grabbed the apple TV remote and pushed a button to kill the screensaver, it continued working as normal, which was surprising. I was expecting it to start stuttering again. The stuttering was every few seconds and it stopped AS SOON as the screensaver came on. I have a hard time believing that is coincidence, but I have not yet had an opportunity to repeat the experiment. I was actually reading this thread in frustration when it suddenly started working.

I notice this problem is exacerbated with the iOS 7 upgrade. I had a Bose Soundlink Air (or something like that) and it worked well. There were some rare times it would cut out. After upgrading to iOS 7, I can barely get it to play anything. I replaced the old model with a SoundTouch and still have the same problem. Nothing will play for more than a second and then it just pauses the music. I have a Windows machine with the SoundTouch software on it and was able to stream live radio with NO interruptions for a few hours. So I know it's not my Bose device. I'm able to stream the radio using my phone with no problem. So, it has to be AirPlay. Any one have any recommendations on what to do with an iPhone? Thanks in advance for your help!

I too have the Yamaha HTR-4065 receiver and it was working seemlessly with iPhone 4 and iPad at version iOS 6. I recently purchased another iPhone 5S with iOS 7 and the whole system (iPhone, Receiver and Airplay) stops working properly. The music stops intermittenly practically every few seconds. Not only does it not working with the receiver, it also has the same problems with AppleTV. The whole Airplay circuit has collapsed!

I can confirm with very high level of certainty that the problem is with iOS 7 because I still have another iPhone 4 and iPAD, both with iOS 6 and they're still working PERFECTLY with the receiver, AppleTV and Airplay.

I am beginning to lose faith in Apple and am seriously considering other products.

Apple, please fix this problem!

Thank you!

I have got the same problem here.

No Airplay problems with iOS-devices and AppleTV3. No problem with Airplay of movies from iMac (MacOS 10.7.5) to ATV3.

But: Intermittent Sound while playing music on iTunes on iMac and using Airplay on ATV3.

Alle network setup hints did not work so far.

No problems when streaming music initiated on ATV3.

I've been having this problem for a while (over a year). I have a Windows 7 PC running iTunes, a Mac mini and a bunch of iOS devices (iPhones, iPod, iPad, etc) and have an Airport express hooked to my whole-house audio system. I've run it with the Mac or the PC streaming to the Airport Express and it cuts out after a few songs. Also forgot to mention, my music (63,000 approx songs) is saved on a network shared drive.

I have finally found a solution, at least for the PC: I turned off my screen saver. It didn't matter if I changed the screen saver settings to delay the start of the screen saver for several hours or a few minutes, the fact that it was on was causing it to cut out. It's been a couple of weeks now since I disabled my screen saver and it's been working flawlessly.

I haven't tried this with the Mac mini yet but I suspect that may solve the Mac issue as well.

I've experienced the same thing. But the most recent time, with my airplay (AE) stemmed from a firmware upgrade which I was missing. I was using 7.6.1 and Apple had released a 7.6.4 in August 2013. Obvously I had missed a few other upgrades in the interim. But, once I updated the AE firmware to the latest 7.6.4, all went well. Just go into your AE utility and check that you're up to date on this critical item. Hoep this helps.

I've had the AirPlay cut-out problem for years, on a variety of iOS and non-Apple devices. It's annoying, and if there were a good alternative, I'd consider switching. The technology purports to offer a simple way to distribute music throughout the house, but the implementation is flawed.

It's interesting that Apple seem not to be pushing AirPlay very hard. They don't advertise it heavily and there are few AirPlay speakers available. Perhaps it's effectively an orphan, like Apple TV. If that's so, could it be because they just can't make it work with 99.9% reliability? Could it simply be too complicated, because there are too many things over which they have no control that can cause it to fail? How hard are they working on fixing it? Have they effectively given up, having decided that there's little competition and that no one else has found a way to make it work, either?