I don’t know if this is a common problem, but often times when listening to music over AirTunes, (that’s my AirPort Express that is connected to my speaker system and playing my iTunes via WiFi…) I get songs the keep cutting out, like they need to keep being rebuffered. It drives me absolutely batty, and I can’t seem to come up with a consistent reason for the problem.

I recently, though, discovered a solution. If I start having my music cut out on me ever 30 seconds or so, I simply change my speaker settings so that it plays from multiple speakers, in my case it’s my stereo and my laptop. As soon as I do this, the music stops cutting out. It plays perfectly.

I don’t fully understand what the difference is in these two settings. I would need to do more research on the subject, but it appears that more precedence is given to iTunes if it need to play music from the computer speakers, so it keeps on top of the streaming in this mode, whereas when only broadcasting to remote speakers, the streaming takes a back seat to other processes. Somehow this doesn’t seem to jive, because often I will have “few” processes running on my machine and have trouble, while other times I will have tons of applications running and have no issues at all.

Not sure why this happens, but… it does.