Comments on: AirPort Express audio drop out – how I solved it.

By: rick parks

rick parks — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:41:49 +0000

Okay. I went into the offending airports settings and went to manual settings/then wireless/then wireless network options/ then chose a lower multicast rate (I’d had it set on 11, so I chose half that)
and for the last half hour… no drop-outs!
good luck friends.
I know how maddening this is.

By: Doug Wit

Doug Wit — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:01:56 +0000

Do yourself a favor and put the $99 toward a nice dock or something. The Airport extreme is not worth the money.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:46:25 +0000

My 2 cents….
I run iMac with TV, extreme, express and iPhones as remotes to TV or Mac. I get dropouts exclusively with the express.
Everything else works fine. Whether I stream from the iPhone directly to the express or from the iMac, the result is the same. Random dropouts of signal which drives me insane. Apparently, sigh, I am not the only express user with this problem.
Is there not someone from Apple who can resolve this issue?

By: Garry

Garry — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 15:59:46 +0000

It’s a firmware issue.

I have Airport Extreme, Airport Express, MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhones, iMac, etc, and the setup has worked perfectly for the past 5 or 6 years until the last few months. Now, I now suffer music dropout when streaming from any of the above devices and, occasionally, lose internet to my MacBook Pro.

It goes without saying, I have done everything. Resetting, re-sighting, rebuilding the network, the lot. The only thing that usually helps is if I put the laptop, iPad, etc., within a foot or two of the Airport Express. But I haven’t had to do this for the last 5 years. Until recently, everything has been perfect.

I can only think this has something to do either with the latest iTunes release, or Airport Express firmware. Something has affected the range of the system and it seems we are all suffering to varying degrees. Unless we all have faulty Airport Expresses! Haha!

Come on Apple. This needs sorting.

Garry Robson.

By: Myles

Myles — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:11:12 +0000

Having this problem with music playing on my Apple TV (160G), streaming over my network (Airport Extreme, plus two Airport Expresses to extend range). Using iTunes 10.0. No serious network traffic going on, but dropouts of several seconds occur randomly? Just tried setting the streaming buffer to LARGE on my iMac iTunes. Will see if this helps, even though its not presently the streaming source?

By: glfrancisco

glfrancisco — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 06:23:30 +0000

Greetings, this troubled me for some time also. I’m using Windows 7, Airport Extreme and 2 Airport Expresses. Worked well until iTunes 9, then drop outs, iphone and ipod would only connect at inital connection and then wouldn’t reconnect and like Nick said you’d have some friends around to listen to some tunes and spend half the night stuffing with iTunes and wireless trying keep it alive. I tried everything reinstalling itunes, bonjour, firewall settings, antivirus all to no avail.

What i did… turned off Use wide channels…that’s it!!!!!!!!!!!

Been 4 hours now and not one drop out ipod and phone reconnect at will.

Hope this saves someone months of aggravation.

Cheers

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:28:56 +0000

Finally! I’ve made the decision to put the Airport Express away for good. I got it to work with a old version of Itunes (think it was 7 or something). But with 9 it’s just a bad product. I’ve tried every tip i’ve found on the net without any success.

I can’t believe they make a product this bad, or a product where you have to be a engineer to make it work. Bye bye Apple!

By: jeff

jeff — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:17:33 +0000

This seems to be a major issue with the Airport (there are hundreds of messages all over the web !) – Apple should be doing more to resolve this problem; the product is NOT doing what it says on the tin. Like many others on this forum I have tried most of the suggestions to repair, with little success. It is still randomly dropping out (spoiling the listening experience)- I’ve gone back to WIRES…aaaggghhhh!!!

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 16 May 2010 15:29:35 +0000

Couldn’t agree more on this post. It’s a nice thing to show off to your mates but embarassing when you end up having to mess around with resetting iTunes/computers when you are trying to chill with friends.

I have a Windows based network working from a BT home hub. I have had various problems with the Airport Express and one main area had been around it dropping, almost constantly, after 5 minutes. If we were downloading or syncing with my apple tv you may as well forget working Airport Express at the same time. The only option I found when using the Airport Express with my own wirless network (not as an extender) was to downgrade the security from WPA to WEP with 64 bit security. Confusingly the AE has no setting for 64 bit – only 40. After trying this with 128 I couldn’t find the AE. The only option was to have the network on 6 bit and the ae on 40 bit. I have been successfully streaming my music now for two hours…..no dropped network yet.

By: DWYutzy

DWYutzy — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:48:53 +0000

The CPU was the issue on my end. I was running VisualHub compressing a movie in the background and had all kinds of drop-outs via AE wirelessly, even though I could play locally just fine. Once I stopped the compression and let the CPU settle down, the tunes magically started in the other room.