Problem Streaming music.

I have this exact same problem - and to be honest, it's one of two things in my opinion.

#1 LAME encoder header info/ something weird with the files
#2 (and i think this is more likely) HEAT.

The apple tv gets RIDICULOUSLY hot - even when it's in sleep mode it's scortching.... the longer mine is on the more likely this is - however, that said, it's still inconsistent. I just had that happen 2x.. first it went to the track and was playing but no sound.. then i hit the next button and it crapped back to the menu.. then i selected the same album again - and it is playing now...

Annoying and somewhat buggy - This has been happening since the first day.


For the sake of trying to solve the issue - can you tell me what kind of router you have - whether you are on b,g,n, is windows or a mac serving, do you notice your device getting hot, what kind of files, aac or mp3, what bitrate, and if you know, which encoder.

Sorry to reply to my own post.

This is becoming a real issue - it's happening more and more frequently. I am now being paused/bumped to track listing about every 3rd song.

My router is about 7 ft from the base station - there's no interference that i can see. I may try to do a factory reset.. but i doubt highly that will accomplish much.

doesn't happen with video - w/t/f? Also happens on 3 diff hosting machines.. there's also no wifi dropout on any laptop in the house(3)

Disappointing.

It can't really respond to this since I store all music on the ATV. But I have no problems streaming video.

glor

I just did the factory restore - same issue.. ridiculous. I'm going to see if i can figure out what the issue is using a packet analyzer - see where it's dumping. it's obviously some kind of a buffering/link issue - but why is my question - i still think heat is causing a malfunction as i have 0 problems with any other device - 3 laptops, 360 wireless, ethernet bridge on old xbox running xbmc, etc, etc.

signal strength is 4/5 bars too.. fwiw.
assigning a static helped nothing
network utilization on my server is < .5% when streaming.

Have you tried direct connecting the ATV to the router rather than using wireless? If it works correctly at that point, then you at least know it is something to do with the wireless connection. What access point are you using? I have an airport extreme 'N' edition.

Glor

I haven't done that as i can stream video without interruption and stream music to multiple other devices.

What i did just test was - i converted one of my 320 mp3's to 128 aac and that eliminates the issue. This is a buffer issue for high bitrate mp3 files it seems. I wonder if apple pushed the envelope too far trying to get instant on and didn't account for people using 320 files..

this is all preliminary - but so far the bitrate change has been the only thing to make a difference.

I also - restarted all machines involved, reinstalled itunes on the server, disabled the server firewall, changed from a mixed mode network to g only.

If it is not a buffering issue, i wonder if the atv has issues with lame headers in the files.

lol as i wrote this - the 320 mp3 is now playing without issue.. let's see if that holds true. Nope, crapped a minute un and popped me back to the track list.

i'm going to rip a cd to 320 aac and see if this happens.same cd to apple lossless, same cd with lame encoder.

same thing with apple lossless.. it looks like it's a filesize bitrate issue with music.. i'll double check some video.

ok, so here's the thing - after doing all the stuff to try and make it work - I ended up making it worse, somehow.. however - i ended up changing the wifi channel and most of the issues seem to be resolving - which is odd since no other device has/had any issue on any channel.

To the OP - can you try changing your wifi channel andsee if that resolves your issue - i'm starting to wonder if this is a combination of sensitivity with the new draft n cards and the occasional mp3 header.

More testing to do but it's a start. Also what kind of router are you working with?