There is often only praise for Apple’s products. I have a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, a Time Capsule and an Airport Express (APX) and am mostly sold on their benefits over the alternatives. This is fine, since in all cases I have generally paid more than the alternatives and so expect a better experience, but when things do not work it is far more annoying.

The APX is designed to stream music from iTunes over a wireless or wired network to a stereo, thus avoiding the need for unnecessary wires coming out of the Mac. It just doesn’t seem to work though. Connecting to it is slow and in some cases impossible. Songs cut out or deteriorate in quality and often stop streaming in between songs.

I wasn’t completely sure whether to blame the APX at first. I thought it may be a problem with one of the many other components of my network or setup. I streamed directly from my mac to see if the time capsule was guilty. That worked fine. I tried wiring up the Airport by ethernet. That didn’t work. Trawled the forums for advice on what wireless channel to use, the type of wifi security, the wiress protocol etc. I even tried reverting to an earlier version of iTunes. Any version before 8.0 seems popular. Although there is no consensus on the subject.

Yesterday I changed my Wifi security from WEP to WPA2. This screwed most things at first. Not least the internet, which seemed to only allow me to go to certain websites. I fixed this with some MTU reconfiguration on both the airport settings and at the router. Interestingly my router, (A Belkin N+ F5d8635) supposedly runs on 802.11n, but operates on b/g or n frequencies and connects to the APX over the N protocol specifically. It connects to the Time Capsule differently though and I suspected that may be to blame. After setting the router back to operating only on 802.11g, things seemed to work fine. Although I have yet to test at multiple times of the day and over a significant period of time.