Intermittent AirPlay playback, AUDIO only!
Hi,
I've had an Apple TV for over 6 months now, it is the 3rd Gen. I use to have a really slow internet connection (5 Mbps) and surprisingly enough I never had any problems with AirPlay. It took some time to load but once I was pass that, everything worked just fine. Recently, I moved into an apartment building, as opposed to a house I lived in before. After moving, I started noticing that AirPlay stuttered a lot! It would cut off for a few seconds and come back. Surprisingly, this problem only occured when I streamed music. I use Rdio to stream music, so naturally I thought that might be the problem, or maybe my internet is just slow but then I used my default Music app and the problem persisted.
Eventually, I just switched to a new internet provider. I get 25Mbps speeds which is 5 times better than the one I had previously. Unlike my old ISP, the new one didn't offer me a built-in router in the modem so I started using my old AirPort Express (2nd Gen) that I've had for almost 2 years now. I thought maybe using an Apple router would definitely fix my problems but I was wrong again! I'm still having the same problem and once again only while streaming audio, video streaming works just fine with no interruptions. After doing some research, I read a post which hinted at this problem occurring in apartment buildings. I used Apple's troubleshooting guide to change the name of the network so it isn't the "default" that everyone else uses, I also put on an on-screen passcode every time I have to use AirPlay, hoping my connection isn't interfering with anyone else with an Apple TV in the building, to NO luck! I also read somewhere that home appliances can interfere with my internet connection and that I should change my radio channel on my AirPort Express to see if that helps. I haven't tinkered around too much with that, mostly because I don't know much of what I'm doing in this matter and I would appreciate anybody's help!
To sum up, this only occurs when I stream music to my Apple TV. Video streaming from iTunes, Plex, and all iOS apps works seamlessly.
iPhone 5, iOS 7.0.4