AirPlay vs. P2P AirPlay - which is more stable?

I take the ferry to San Francisco these days, I did live in Sunnyvale for a few years though.

 

Sheesh, I use AirPlay all the time without issue on multiple devices to multiple AppleTvs. But all my ATVs are connected via Cat5.

Use the ATV in my office to feed Airdisplay to TV, but the only issue is with my MacPro randomly rebooting when using multiple displays. But that also happens with any combination of two monitors. I've heard it may be a bad video card, but it worked flawlessly under 10.9. Really the first issue I have had with any Mac OS going back to before System7 and even ProDOS.

 

That's a bug that was introduced with iOS 8 - still waiting for a fix on that as well.

I agree that it does seem that Apple ship with more serious bugs than they used to. I just installed iTunes 12.1 and scrolling through artwork in a track's Get Info window is broken (the pane is scrolled but the images within it stay fixed). iTunes must be bad spaghetti by now, I would think.

 

Just curious... how many of you folks with cover art issues do not embed the artwork directly in the file? I finally bit the bullet a couple of years ago and decided that letting iTunes provide the artwork with their link-to-some-encrypted-file mechanism was just too buggy. That never seemed to consistently work, especially on IOS devices. So now I hunt it down artwork, prep it, and embed it in each file. Yeah, a PITA, but once you get used to doing it, it's only a bit of extra overhead when importing something into my library. I almost always have to tweak the metadata a bit too.

 

I make a big effort to get good, hirez artwork - it can look fabulous on an HD TV (on mine it looks LP sized in ATV). The artwork that iTunes digs up isn't bad - but often isn't quite accurate - like when it uses the artwork from a compilation of releases instead of a release itself.

 

Something that's frustrating about this is that iTunes used to do this better -- you'd tell it to go find all the artwork for all your albums and it would do it would find 90% of it without problems. Then it became something you had to do album-by-album and the success rate dropped to >50%. I recently found a mac utility called Yate that can accurately find album artwork, and it has options of imbedding and/or updating iTunes metadata.

 

I prefer to manually embed the album artwork because I never trusted the automatical and mostly inscrutable method of iTunes. I also think manually embedding is the only method to make sure artwork travels reliably across different computers and devices.

 

I think you're right. I didn't realize all the time I spent editing metadata in itunes was really only editing itunes XML files as best I can tell.

 

Do any devices besides the most-recent Apple TV support P2P AirPlay? Any third party devices?

 

I strongly recommend to use software like Metadatics or similar. This way you can be sure to edit only metadata which actually is embedded in the audio files instead of data stored separately somewhere deeply hidden in a proprietary library.

 

I'm done. My second AppleTV experiment ended dismally. The ******* AppleTV kept dropping the network connection. If it didn't fail utterly, it hang at least one every three songs when streaming from my iMac. AppleTV is a steaming pile. I've had two of them. Spent hundreds on trying to get music in my media room. That's it. I ain't spending any more $$$ on that. The only reliable option for playing music in my media room is a USB connection for my iPad into my AV receiver. No cover art, but it actually works.

 

So the AppleTV is a steaming pile because your network doesn't work? Have you tried any other device to see if it's actually the device vs something else? Or ran a hard connection just to test?

 

The fact that yours work with wired Ethernet connections is a useful data point. But in my case, where I get very spotty Airplay performance streaming from Mac computers fed via 802.11AC Apple Airport Extremes, what do you suppose it is I'm doing wrong? No other devices on my network experience dropouts, and there's no issues with signal strength.

Now circa 2008 Airplay, a few dozen revisions ago, that worked great.

 

Yeah, pretty much. So if it works for you, that means it works for everybody?

I've spent money on two different AppleTVs, a recent model Airport Time Capsule router. The WiFi network works flawlessly with every other device on it, including both Apple and non-Apple devices, and the AppleTV can't stream music reliably from an iMac sitting less than 30 feet from it? Yeah, STEAMING PILE.

 

Just wondering if you've done any research into why the network is dropping. An ethernet cable is a great troubleshooting tool. Many wi-fi devices don't slam the network nearly like streaming video. Audio is very lightweight though. Have you done a scan to see what other devices are on that channel or if neighbors are using the same channel.

The Mac has a Wireless utility that is hidden deep in OS X at /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications. It has a nice scanner that can help select best channel.

It's actually really crazy how much stuff we have on our home networks these days. I have a two person household and my router shows 30 devices currently pulling IP's on my network.

 

I know you are just trying to be helpful. But honestly, I need another hobby like I need a hole in my head. When I spend the kind of money I've already spent (2xAppleTVs, a new router), I just need shizzle to work. If cars worked this poorly, congress would be holding hearings. Anyway, I'm very happy with the iPad into USB port solution. I played music for 4 hours last weekend and no hiccups whatsoever.

I do use a WiFi utility. There's never more than 12 devices on our network. I also assign the heaviest duty device (my desktop) to a separate 5GHz band. I've tried all the permutations. Changing networks, manually assigning channels. As I said, the other devices (every single one of them) work just fine. AppleTVs have scarcely worked at all.

But again, thank-you for your help.