AirPort Express (Lookout distress) /19 April 2009 @ 12pm
Update: Following a recent update iTunes and the AirPort get on a lot better.
It has been a while since I’ve splashed out on any new gadgets, so I convinced myself that what I needed was an AirPort Express to wirelessly stream music to some speakers I have in my living room. Sadly however it was not quite so simple.
First up I will give you a bit of background on me so you know where I am coming from. I am a computer science grad and work as a developer, as such I would class myself above the average user. I am not scared to get my hands dirty working out the odd computer problem. I also use a MacBook Pro as my primary home computer and have a Siemens Gigaset-SE587 router that my broadband provider (tiscali) supplied.
Picture from the apple website
The Airport Express (AE), a little white box of glory that according to apple will provide a utopian wireless paradise where you can stream audio from iTunes all over the place. The reality for me however is that all I seem to see is this: (picture taken from iTunes)
Great no? NO.
So what did I do to deserve this? Well, I plugged it in, followed the instruction in the box. Ran through the setup wizard and got a green light. Great. Went into iTunes and enabled airtunes and then the option for the AE popped up at the bottom of the iTunes window. Selected it and then tried to play a song. Then the error.
Looking on Google it seems that I am not the only one to have this error. Also there does not seem to be any real fix. The best I could find was to wait until the moon was in its 7th phase and then sacrifice a lamb. Sadly as I did not have a lamb to hand I had to try other options like fiddling with all the settings for the AE.
After no luck I decided that I wanted to know if iTunes could actually see the AE rather than just display its name, so I set a password on it for music. iTunes dutifully asked me for the password. I entered it, clicked a song and would you believe it, sound started emanating from the other side of the room. Fantastic. I took the password setting off an it still worked.
Now the really strange thing is that after I closed and reopened iTunes I got the error again. Setting the password did not fix it either. Taking the password off however did. Then the following morning I turned on my computer and decided to give airtunes another go and got the error again. This time messing with passwords made no difference. At this point I was about ready to take it back. I had spent about 6 hours and it still seemed unstable.
After a bit more reading on a forum about other people with similar problems I came across Airfoil by Rouge Amoeba. I installed the trial version and started playing a song in iTunes and used Airfoil to connect to the AE and it worked.
Now it is not all good news as I have had errors with Airfoil as well although it does provide more info on the error and has worked about 8 out of 10 times so far. iTunes has worked 1 time out of 10. From the error message airfoil provided it seems there is an issue with the server running on the AE or something like that.
So will I take the AE back to the shop…at the moment no. I will give it a couple of weeks to see if it is usable with airfoil and if so then great. I will say this though, I am a self confessed Apple fan and this was not a typical experience I would associate with the brand. I realise that for some it works right out of the box and there is no issue, for others though it is a total pain. I also realise that in the world of wireless networks there are so many hardware variables that it is impossible to guarantee a seamless experience. I am skeptical however that my problems would be solved even if I were using an airport extreme base station instead of the router my broadband provider supplied.
. I will try to get in touch with you in as many ways as possible, therefor I apologize if I repeat my self along the way some where! Please let me know if you get this so at least I know. Writing to gmail will come strait to my pocket so I guess it would be the best and cheapest way!
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