These small, handy little music boxes stopped working under OSX since Mountain Lion. Here’s how to revive them and get them working on Yosemite.
Apple loves to leave perfectly working technology behind.
If you have one they’ll carry on working until you change your network settings or want to update them in some way, then you’ll find the latest version of Airport Express Utility can’t find them.
When updates to OSX Mountain Lion and Yosemite made the old Airport Express base stations no longer worked Corey J. Mahler stepped in to offer a fix.
He wrote a little utility that allows the old version of Airport Utility to work on new versions of OSX.
The one thing not mentioned in that article is you can only connect to the base stations via Ethernet. Setting them up via wi-fi won’t work as it auto-launches the new versions of AirPort Utility, version 6.
If like me you have a MacBook Air with no Ethernet, you’ll need a USB to Ethernet dongle.
I bought these two from eBay (search for Airport Express ‘for parts or not working’, £23 for the pair, and we can now stream music to different rooms in the house.
Update Matthew Davison suggests using the iOS Airplay App to configure old base stations. It seems it can still talk to them.