Computer Audio Asylum

Posted by hermanesque (A) on February 11, 2007 at 17:32:23

This is long, but bottom line is my advice is to wait until Apple gets things ironed out unless you have a system without multiple devices. I also see a lot of similar horror stories on Apple’s website discussion forum.

My computer network is

- Multiple USB drives hooked to a PC running iTunes with a wireless G card
- A macbook
- One Airport Express serving as a router and a USB print server
- 3 other AEs that I stream audio to from the PC or the macbook to 3 different stereos
- A PC laptop I sometimes use with iTunes
- A Palm that I use to control iTunes with a VPN
- A network printer that my PCs talked to via Ethernet and the macbook wirelessly through the express router via the USB port.

Everything shares the internet through the Express router and can stream to the other Expresses.

The macbook is used by my wife and shares the iTunes library hooked to the PC. I wanted the new extreme because I could hook the hard drives to it so she wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of sharing my library and I wouldn’t have to leave the PC running when I travel. She’s not very computer savvy. I thought the wireless N would be good for future updates.

The extreme comes with a new admin utility you have to use. I configured it and it looked to work but couldn’t see any of the expresses. I reset an express and configured it and iTunes could see the express and it would stream music to it but now the admin couldn’t see either the extreme or the express. It could configure another express after I reset it but iTunes couldn’t use it because the admin utility couldn’t see the IP address of the router and assigned a bad address to the express. I could manually assign an IP address and iTunes could see it.

After a few hours on the phone with Apple (they first tried to tell me I didn’t qualify for support because my extreme wasn’t in their system even though I bought it direct so I had to bully them to help me) it worked, sort of.

Each time I configured an express or changed a setting on the extreme it would screw up the security settings for the extreme so my computers couldn’t see it. Every time I changed anything and updated I had to delete all keychain settings and reset the passwords. Then

-I kept getting dropouts with iTunes when I never had them with before
-nothing could print,
-the extreme wouldn’t let the Palm join the network

I went back to my original setup using an express as a router, but now it couldn’t see the other expresses and when I tried to reset them even the old admin kept giving them invalid IP addresses. It didn't even work if I assigned the IP address manually. I reloaded the old software that came with the AE and reconfigured and now everything works.

What a disaster. I will be returning the Extreme ASAP.