iTunes 11 airplay stops in middle of songs, why?

Guys, we need to separate the issues here. It's not a sleep issue. It's an iTunes 11 issue. My computer is set to never sleep and still does it.

That's not to say there's not a sleep issue as well, but at least it's not what's causing iTunes 11 to stop playback. It does it regardless.

Hi Girls and Guys,

With my iMac the problem only seemed to occur when my Mac went to sleep. I have set "Computer sleep" to never and that solved the problem for me. So I cannot point to iTunes 11 directly, it must be some combination of software and hardware. What is true, is that I did not have this issue before I upgraded to iTunes 11.

Hopefully this problem will be solved soon so I can go back to my old energy settings.

interesting observation

Airplay to a Boxee Box from Windows 7 box via iTunes 11 (that stops every time to AppleTV) ran for 2 hours last night without stopping once.

Same problem here with ATV 3 and an iMac running iTunes 11. Video or music will stop after 10 minutes or so with the ATV returning tothe top level home screen.

Strangly, this behaviour only occurs when ATV is using wired ethernet, if I unplug the ethernet cable and use WiFi all works fine. (iMac is also wired and my router is a Time Capsule).

Not a great soution though as WiFi is a bit slow for certain tasks such as browsing photos in an iPhoto library.

This setup all worked fine until iTunes 11.

This solved the problem for me.

I have experienced the same problem, specifically where audio streaming over AirPlay stops. Sometimes the player shows that it's continuing but no sound emerges from the speakers, but sometimes the player simply stops in the middle of the song. However, I have had some success today with playing both computer speakers and AirPlay simultaneously.

We have a MacPro running MTLion with the large iTunes library and two laptops, one running MTLion and one still on Lion (best upgrade decision I've made lately, leaving a laptop on the previous OS release). I've already upgraded the large library to iTunes 11, but the laptops are still running iTunes 10.7. However, even mounting the large library over Home Sharing and running AirPlay from there caused the same kinds of audio drop-out problems.

This happens to me all the time. Airplay is unusable in iTunes 11. It has nothing to do with disk or mac sleeping. As soon as I put it on multiple speakers and play to an airport express connected speaker, I get maybe 2 songs to play and then audio cuts out on both airplay device and iMac. The songs are playing, just no audio. If I make an adjustment to the airplay setting (like click single), audio starts again.

I'm on latest update of Mountain Lion.

I have the same problem. ipad controls imac itunes 11 library on Mac mounatin lion through remote app. Worked perfectly before buy now stops. Wife is not happy......so I am not happy. Help Apple!!!!

BTW everyone. Apple doesn't necessarily read all these threads. Make sure you report your issues over at the iTunes feedback page:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Hopefully if enough of us complain and give them information about our setups they can fix the error (which has happened twice already tonight).

Good idea...done! I can stream from my imac to my ATV if I choose both the computer and the ATV as multiple speakers from the itunes running on the imac. It does not stall this way, but it has to be controlled from either the imac, ipad or iPhone, not the ATV. Does this work for anyone else? It played for 8 hours today without a stop.

I posted on the iTunes feedback page and referenced this thread. There is a low level system setting in OS X that can prevent the Mac from sleeping. For example when time machine is doing a backup it will trigger this setting and prevent the Mac from sleeping. It seems like iTunes is not triggering this setting when AirPlay is active.

I can't imagine this is too hard for apple to fix. It seems like it effecting everyone on iTunes 11

I join you all experiencing same issues. I believe it has nothing to do with disk or mac sleeping. When I use airplay (single or multiple speakers) at a certain moment the whole system will stop. I've blocked IPv6, which improved it a bit, but not 100%. It's dissapointing and frustrating. Left similar message with: http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

experiencing the same problems since the new iTunes version this month. I too have submitted the problem to the feedback link appearing in your note today. The problem seems to come and go. Today, music played for more than three hours whereas yesterday could not keep multiple speakers going for one hour.

all,

I finally went back to 10.7; see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4556384?start=0&tstart=0

Wow! That seems pretty complicated... I do have a TM backup, though. I tried to just restore itunes to 10.7 and it wouldn't read the library; the additional steps are necessary to get everything coordinated, I guess. I am going to give them another week or so and see if they issue a bug fix. I saw somewhere that they are fixing the duplicate song problem, so maybe this issue will be corrected too. Hope so. Thanks for the link, dutchmike.