As you’ve heard before, I have the house all hooked up wirelessly for Internet access and music. We’ve got an Airport Extreme wireless router and three Airport Expresses, one on each floor connected to different stereos.
Ever since I’ve set this up here, I’ve had more or less frequent “skipping” in the music… more like short pauses. All sorts of things seem to affect its frequency. It’s been very frustrating, and it has lasted months. I even bought a special antenna for the router to try and fix it. No luck.
So, I’m researching an unrelated thing today, and I stumble across a firmware update for the Expresses that reportedly fixes the skipping.
Eureka… but SHEESH! Why didn’t I get notified of this? I’m a registered owner of a boatload of Apple wireless stuff.
So, for the record… Airport Extreme current firmware is v5.7. Airport Express current firmware is 6.3. With this setup, and iTunes 6.02 or greater, you’ll get skipless music AND the ability to route the music to multiple speakers. Oh, and don’t forget to turn off UDP blocking in your personal firewall or the multiple speakers thing will return an error message.
iTunes and the Airport Express is still the greatest home music distribution system on the planet. But, man, it’s a pain to make everything work sometimes.
