Previously added a snarky comment to the article How to AirPlay to Your Mac about how it doesn’t work too well from mine. Apologies, but it’s since gotten worse. Worse to the point that I contacted Support. That’s always frustrating because they assume you’re a typical user and run through a cookbook of possibly inappropriate steps they want you to try, most of which disconnect your chat.
As many of you know, there are two places where you can connect to AirPlay devices on the Mac: the AirPlay icon in the Music app or from the Control Centre icon on the menubar.
Since updating the computer to 12.5.1, the Control Centre toggle completely fails to connect to my speakers. Just hangs forever. From the Music app AirPlay icon, I can get a connection but the Music app goes into a zombie state where it fails to display the track it’s playing: usually there’s a crawler showing the track time. That’s frozen. When the next track starts playing, the display doesn’t get updated. It also doesn’t record the track it’d just played. Then after a while it drops the connection and hangs, forcing a restart of the app.
Restarted the computer in Safe Mode. No joy there: exact same behaviour. Control Centre can’t connect and Music app gets zombified.
The Mac is a 2021 Macbook Pro overspecified with way too much RAM and storage. The speakers are B&W Formation Duo (which sound fabulous when the source works). I’ve had absolutely no issues with the speakers using AirPlay from my phone (iPhone 13m) but my music library is on the Mac. That’s where I curate tracks to determine the small subset that gets synced to the phone.
Found plenty of complaints about AirPlay, wireless speakers, and the Mac on various and sundry Internet forums, but most are a few years old. Couldn’t find anything recent.
AirPlay isn’t very forthcoming about its failures, either. There’s probably some logging somewhere but I’ve yet to find it.
Wondering if the brain trust herein has any insights and/or suggestions.
BTW: The Apple Support tech suggested reinstalling the O/S. Not keen on that, mostly because it probably won’t fix anything. (I’ve friends in QA at Apple. A constant refrain from them is how shoddy QA is done there. Maybe they’re just cynics (like me) but it seems to match my experience of excessive broken software from the Fruities.)
I have found Airplay to be somewhat fickle, and definitely prone to difficult-to-diagnose issues. I was having a lot of trouble with one of the speakers getting dropped, or music getting out of sync between speakers. For unrelated reasons, I recently went poking around in my mesh router (Orbi RBR50) configuration to improve video call performance, and discovered that moving my satellite and reducing the CTS/RTS Threshold from 2347 to 500 improved networking performance dramatically and seems to have fixed most of the issues with speakers dropping out or losing sync.
replaced the macbook pro with an equally overspecified (when will i learn?) m2 minimac. if anything, its airplay issues are even worse than the macbook.
can most probably pin the problem on an incompetently implemented wifi stack. running speedtest on the mac gives pathetic results. for a reality check, running speedtest on both phones and the ipad gets results that are twice to an order of magnitude faster, depending on how sluggish the mac’s results were.
too often, the mac’s attempt just fails: “no internet access” it claims.
again apple support suggested reinstalling the o/s. as it was a brand-new machine and i’d an up-to-date time machine backup, did that. fixed the problem for a week or two. then it came back. this time apple support suggested a hard restart. again, fixed the problem for a while. it’s back.
unfortunately, the layout of my house militates against running ethernet to the minimac, but i don’t see any other solution. constantly restarting and/or reinstalling the machine is an unacceptable answer to the problem.
btw: there’s a thread on apple’s support site that indicates i’m not the only victim. however, i’ve found the quality of help on that forum can’t hold a candle to this site.
got a tp-link av1000 powerline kit from b&h. installed it.
the bad news is the link has to hop breakers so gigabit ethernet is right out. getting about 80mbps down and weirdly 120mbps up whereas my phone is seeing 460down/50up (50? weird).
the good news is the connection is rock solid. streaming to the wireless speakers has been flawless since i plugged in the powerline.
bottom line is i’m a happy camper. thanks again for the suggestion, doug.
btw: i’m again using airfoil cuz it’s a better solution than apple’s airplay toggle.
i’d been contentedly streaming tunes from the mac to my wireless speakers up until about a month ago or so. then the glitches returned. playback would stutter or dropout. restart the airfoil app and it’d see two wireless speaker sets. wtf? i’d thought moving to ethernet had solved my issue?
started troubleshooting my network. and there was the problem starring me in the face: somehow the mac had associated itself to wifi. osx, in its underwhelming brilliance, prioritises wifi over ethernet.
enough.
turned off icloud keychain on the assumption that the tiny benefit it offers is negated by its hoarding of all the wifi information my ios devices care about but the mac needn’t know. then wiped the wifi data from the mac.
Turn off Wifi from the menu bar icon, control center, or System Settings>Network.
(better) Change the service order. This has been available in the Network settings forever. In Monterey, go to System Settings>Network and tap the …|ˇ button at the bottom. Select ‘Set Service Order’ and drag Ethernet to the top. If the Ethernet connection is available, it will always be selected.
certain memory ganglia, being a bit spotty thanks to lurgi, got twitched thanks to your list. thought i’d set the service order on my mac a while back. checked: yup, had. which thus makes me suspect service order is yet another osx placebo. once the mac was no longer associated with my wifi network, its stuttering data transfer entirely cleaned up.
yet sod’s law continues: the next morning, discovered my phone had forgotten its association to my wifi network. due to the aforementioned lurgi, it’s possible pilot error is/was involved but i’ll be damned if i can figure out how.
my airplay/airfoil nightmare continues. running airfoil by ethernet into my wireless network. after a while, tunes just stop playing. sometimes airfoil reports that it’s been retrying. sometimes it apparently hasn’t noticed. the break is sometimes a second or so. sometimes it goes away for a minute.
it’s beyond frustrating that something as simple as streaming audio from a computer to a wireless loudspeaker just doesn’t work. streaming to the same speakers from ios seems rock steady but that isn’t helpful given my record collection resides on the disk of that inept mac computer.
this morning, the mac totally fails to connect to my wireless speakers. logged out and back in. rebooted the computer. sandbagged it (powered off). restarted the speakers. powered off the speakers.
nothing works.
initially the phone failed to connect to the speakers but after restarting them is working. the mac? nothing.
I assume your speakers have a line level (RCA) input in addition to wireless. If you have an old, unused Mac that you can position near the speakers, you can run Airfoil Satellite on it and connect the Mac’s headphone output to the speakers.
(If each speaker has only a single input channel instead of a master/slave stereo input, you’ll also need a Y-splitter cable. If the Mac and speakers have Toslink output and input,respectively, you can use that instead.)
afraid not. speakers are bower&wilkins formation duo. they do have an ethernet port in each speaker although only one speaker can be connected that way: they coordinate over a proprietary wireless channel. there’s also a usb-c port but it’s reserved for diagnostics (at the factory).
I see they include Roon integration. Given the price of your speakers, Roon would be a reasonable additional expenditure if you like its interface during the free trial.
You’d have to install Roon on a Mac or PC and connect the speakers to your LAN via ethernet or WiFi.
must confess that i don’t see the value in roon. it appears to run over airplay and airplay is where my system consistently fails. (this morning the airplay connection to the speakers dropped several times. wtf?) so basically i’d be paying them for some additional metadata.
I don’t use Roon, but it is popular among high-end audiophiles who typically listen to lossless FLAC-encoded audio at a 96 KHz sample rate, whereas Airplay only supports 44.1 KHz sample rate. Those audiophiles typically use ethernet between the Roon server and the Roon endpoint that connects to the speakers. I expect your B&W speakers have this capability, or else they wouldn’t have ethernet and WiFi.
i’m an old fart with severe tinnitus. i can’t hear the difference between an identical recording encoded lossless or lossy. thus 98khz is even more pointless.
anyway, i currently haven’t an ethernet connection between the computer and speakers.
Not that this helps much but my speakers don’t like a power interruption. Every time the power goes out, my speakers turn the volume to 0. When power is restored and I try to send to my speakers, I think something is wrong until I remember to turn up the volume on the remote speakers. Then everything is fine again.