Airport Express Mixed Feelings...

I have to say I've owned my airport express ever since I bought a MacBook Air, I though it was the perfect companion for the laptop that doesn't have an ethernet port built in.  When I travel I plug in my airport express and provided wireless for my room, which is very convenient.  I've been very happy with this device, its very easy to configure and works well.  You can extend an existing network or convert a wired ethernet connection to wireless.  Also using the built in USB port for charging my iphone or ipod, makes it convenient and it's one less adaptor I have to carry.  So far so good, until last week when I tried to use the airtunes feature in itunes to send music to the analog output on the airport express.  While it was simple to setup, simply follow the wizard on the airport setup I was not able to get it to work properly.

The first attempt:  I configured the unit to extend my existing wireless network using WDS.  The master station is an airport extreme which I bought previously to fix what I though was another problem see below.  I used the wizard, followed some simple steps and there I was two green lights ready to rock ;-).  I went to itunes changed the destination of the speakers to the new airport express and it worked.  I used it for about an hour and the sound started to cut out.  At first the songs would play for a bit and cut out, it got worst to the point where it would even play.  I thought it was distance or interference so I placed the unit about two feet from the master station and the problem persisted.  

Trouble Shooting:  Now that I ruled out distance or interference I doubled checked that I had the latest firmware and software for the airport and airport express, which I did.  So I went to the web to see if anyone else was having the similar problem and better yet see if they had a solution.  After a couple of hours of searching the internet, I did find quite a few people having issues with the airtunes express and a few of them were having the same issues I was.  

The second attempt:  After reading a few hundred messages and visiting a few websites I found one that suggested to use the airport express as a client and not a bridge.  This sounded reasonable using the airport software I reconfigured the airport express to be a client.  Note, because on the first attempt where I configured the airport express unit to extend the wireless connection it changed the configuration on the airport extreme.  The airport extreme now displayed a yellow light indicating some kind of issue.  When I looked at the error the unit was complaining there were no WDS clients.  Of course I had just reconfigured the airport express to client instead of bridge.  I went into manual setup for the airport extreme and turned off the WDS.  Now with both green lights on I tried it again, unfortunately it had the same result.  The songs would play sporadically, which really sucks when you are trying to follow the a beat.  

My final attempt:  A few of the post spoke about trying the multiple speakers selection in iTunes, which seemed to fix a problem similar to mine.  I configured itunes to use my airport express and my apple TV, which sits on the other side of the house.  While it seemed to work at first after a few minutes the airport express cut out and the apple TV kept playing.  This was it, I would waist no more time on this, obviously the problem has to be with the airport express unit.  

After wasting six hours on a saturday trying to get airtunes to work I finally gave up and decided to write about it.  If someone out there has had this problem and fixed it let me know or if you are having this problem it doesn't look good don't spend too much time on it.  I have to say I'm not sure on the exact model of my airport express base station; but I've had it for about three years and works flawlessly for wireless internet.   Also the computer that is streaming the music is an iMac with the itunes 8.1.1.  By the way I use it to stream movies to my apple TV and works great (not at the same time).   The funny thing about this whole experience is I always though my airport express was a cool device and in truth in all these year I never tried to use the airtunes; but now that I have I'm disappointed with the device, in a way it tainted me.  Oh well maybe apple will come out with a new firmware upgrade and that will take care of the problem.

Thanks for reading...