Airplay audio cuts out intermittently

Derek! Morbid! This is a brilliant solution that works! Been fighting my ALL Apple home (mistake) to make airplay work. I have a NAS where my media files are located with iTunes on a mini via Ethernet. This has never worked since September.

Finally after chasing many voodoo tricks this does work. For 5 hours I had no problems and my network, and overall speediness of iTunes seems to have improved as well.

Thank you thank you!

Apple... Pull head out of sand on this please

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

This solution worked on my wife's 4s, but not my iPhone 4.

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!!!!

Would you please explain that a bit?

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.

Had the same problem and used your "trick"

Seems to work perfectly - no cut-outs for a couple of hours now!!!

THANX!!! 😀

I see no 'network tab' in my airpot utlity (ver. 6.3.1) nor a 'range' field. Can you please be more specific? Would really like to listen to more than 15 seconds of music at a time. Ugh. Any clarification you could provide would be greatly appreciated. Thx.

I can also confirm that for the last 3 years I've also had so much stuttering that there's actually more silence than music in the transmission.

And this only happens when the device *sending* the music is on a 5GHz wireless network.

When I switch my Mac (which is transmitting music from iTunes) to my 2.4GHz network, everything's fine. When I send music from my iPhone (which is connected via the 2.4GHz network), everything's fine (well, aside from the 'popping' issue described here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2651422?start=0&tstart=0).

I tried Derek's fix of disabling IPv6. However, now I can't play anything at all, & I get the following error message in iTunes: "An error occurred while connecting to the AirPlay device “HTR-4065 92BDE8”. The network connection timed out." Switch my Mac to the 2.4GHz network, everything works fine again.

Crazy thing is-- I've had this problem over the last 3 years now. In that time, I've swapped out the Airport Express, gone through 2 more 'main' routers in my home, 2 new Macbook Pros, a whole new receiver + speaker system, etc. And the problem's still there.

That strongly suggests that Airplay is the culprit. I'm surprised this problem isn't more widely reported (at least it is here in this thread), especially with the wider adoption of Wireless-N (we're going to AC soon...). More surprising is that it appears Apple hasn't done anything to resolve it in 3 years.

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.