Q: AirPlay icon missing in iTunes 11.0.5 - Windows 7

I am running OSX 10.9 and the Airplay icon also disappeared from iTunes for me. 

What I found worked was going to:

System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Firewall > Firewall Options > "+" at the bottom of the list of allowed applications, then select "iTunes" from the Applications folder > Add.

(My firewall is On, I dod not check the "Block all incoming connections" or the "Enable stealth mode" boxes, but I did check the "Automatically allow signed software to receive incoming connections" box.

I restarted iTunes and the Airplay icon appeared.

you are a top man my friend. I spent an hour on the phone toapple troubleshooting this issue to no avail. You sorted my problem out straight away. Much  your post. Thank you.

You are welcome Mate.

Hi I appreciate this an old thread but I've lost my airplay icon too.  I'm using windows vista and it's a wired connection.  I've checked and bonjour services is ticked.  The icon disappeared after the October update to version 12 of itunes I think.  I'm fairly computer literate but if anyone can help please try not to get to technical

Thank you

There are plenty of suggestions in this thread, have they all been tried?

The AirPlay icon will only appear if iTunes detects a device on the network that it can send content to, in other words, an AppleTV. 

Is your AppleTV actually on the network?

I spent 6 hours, I was ablo to get the icon back.

I was able to use Airplay to stream through my Airport Express on my iPad mini, icon was there working fine. Problem was a new Windows 7 laptop I got, the icon had never showed up on iTunes. Tried resetting Airport Express many times and defaulting to factory setting, no avail. I thought it must have something to do with fire walls, so I checked Windows 7 fire wall settings, got everything Apple related enabled, did not work.

I came across a post about Symantec and Airplay, it mentioned that Symantec could have something to do with the missing icon. I dug deeper, found Airplay was blocked by Symantec fire wall. Change the setting to allow Airplay, problem resolved.

Open up Symantec, "Network Threat Protection/Options/Configure Fire Wall Rules", find "Airplay" under "Rule Name", click "Edit", select "Allow this traffic", and "Apply this rule to the following network adapter: All network adapters".

RemonJap's suggestion about disabling IPv6 solved it for me too. However, instead of disabling IPv6 on my router, I chose to disable it just on the LAN connection on my PC by clicking on the properties of the LAN connection settings, and unchecking the IPv6 line from the list of options under "This connection uses the following items:". Then restart iTunes (no need to restart the PC), and the air-play icon should appear next to the volume slider.

This workstation has been using air-play fine in the past with IPv6 enabled, so I'm not sure when the Bonjour service started getting confused about which protocol version to use. The air-play device itself certainly doesn't use IPv6, nor does anything on our network AFAIK.

Here are other items I did up to the final solution. They didn't solve it for me but may help you save time:

• Ensured Bonjour service was running, service set to start automatically.
• Turned off the Windows firewall and restarted iTunes. Didn't make a difference so turned the firewall back on.
• ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew on a cmd line.
• Uninstalled Oracle VMware (since it was no longer needed)---I wasn't sure if its own virtual networks were interfering with the air-play connection or confusing the Bonjour service, but ultimately didn't make a difference.

This solved my problem, thanks!

Disabling IPv6 seemed to cause not-so-obvious problems with Windows networking, so turning it off was no longer an option. However, I read on another forum that manually adding the DNS server settings in to the networking device's configuration seemed to make iTunes and Windows happy (for a few days thus far at least). Specifically, add a specific DNS server IP address pair (e.g., Google's free DNS server) to the Window's network device's IPv6 configuration settings, instead of obtaining the DNS server address automatically.

I suspect that this may work for people whose routers aren't the latest and greatest and may not have an IPv6 DNS customizable configuration built-in to the router itself. Perhaps Apple iTunes engineers assume everyone's using Apple routers.

This totally worked for me, thanks!

Perfect solution!