Airport Express woes

[fRAiLtY-]

Hi,

I recently borrowed an older style Airport Express off a friend to test it with my home cinema. I've connected the AE to my home network via ethernet cable and been through the setup process within AirPort utility. I've just added it to my network, not created a new one or extended. My network has always and still does work perfectly on a VirginMedia 50mb cable connection.

The AE has a steady green LED on the front now and appears in iTunes at the bottom as I wish to take advantage of AirPlay. However, when I try to connect iTunes to it it just "tries to connect" until eventually I get an unknown error, -15006.

The iTunes visibility then disappears for a while until it returns, and the same thing is experienced. The steady green LED never changes and I have reset the device and re-setup several times to no avail. It's also intermittent as to whether it appears in the WiFi list under base-stations.

Any advice or anything I can try?

Cheers.

 

[waw74]

if you haven't already, try rebooting your computer, and also any other network gear (like your router)

i've had a router reboot clear up similar problems for me.

 

[matteman50]

My 802.11g Airport Express stopped working too

Similar problem to OP's here. For years things were going fine with my g Airport Express and AirTunes / AirPlay, over wifi. Worked fine on all OSX versions I used up to and including Lion. The computer is a 2010 Mac Pro. My router has been an Extreme Base Station for a matter of years also. All was fine. A couple of days ago, though, for the first time in about 1-2 weeks, I tried to connect iTunes to the Express' speakers and it just hung for a minute or two on the "Connecting to remote speakers" (maybe the words aren't exact, I'm not at that computer now) dialogue box. Then, the dialogue box vanishes, and iTunes is still not connected to the Express speakers. I just can't seem to make iTunes connect to them.

I've tried rebooting every piece of hardware, and I did a factory reset on the Airport Express (which I was only able to do on Airport Utility 5.5.3, as neither 5.6 nor 6.0 detected the Express after the factory reset - maybe a related issue?), and the problem persists. Airport Utility (all versions) reports the (reconfigured) Express as connected and working fine, and the Express has the solid green light on too. Just, it won't connect with iTunes.

Maybe I'm just bad at Google, but I haven't been able to find a fix. Anyone know anything?

 

[matteman50]

Update on my last post: I found the solution to my problem. In Airport Utility 5.6, I downgraded the Airport Extreme's firmware to 7.5.2, from the current 7.6.1, then rebooted all hardware. Odd, really, that in order for my Mac and my Airport Express to connect, I had to meddle with the Airport Extreme connecting them.

 

[darster]

Update on my last post: I found the solution to my problem. In Airport Utility 5.6, I downgraded the Airport Extreme's firmware to 7.5.2, from the current 7.6.1, then rebooted all hardware. Odd, really, that in order for my Mac and my Airport Express to connect, I had to meddle with the Airport Extreme connecting them.

Where did you find the old firmware?

 

[darster]

The problem with slow itune downloads may not be related to the AE. Oddly, some apps of the same size would take seconds to download, while others would take 5 minutes. really strange

 

[matteman50]

Where did you find the old firmware?

I'm not at that computer now, but as I remember it, with some help from Google:

In Airport Utility 5.6, under the "Summary" tab, the "Version" field is clickable. Click it and you can select older versions of the firmware. Once you apply the new setting, the Airport reboots into the selected firmware version.

Warning: my Time Machine backup got de-linked or de-associated from my Mac by this process, but that's off-topic and perhaps a result of some error I made anyway.