Studio Daily contributor Scott Simmons has written a well-deserved rant on the history of errors in Apple Compressor. Having seen this issue crop up in my own system recently, I can appreciate his frustration. If you are having issues with Compressor spitting back an “unable to connect” error, you might want to read this article as Scott outlines a few troubleshooting options. He also makes a good point about third-party encoding solutions…if Apple isn’t interested in fixing this issue for good, it may be time to look elsewhere. I personally don’t wish to make a switch to another encoding solution; when Compressor works, it works very very well. And it hasn’t really given me any grief up to this point. But a known issue that has apparently existed across versions since 2005 is beginning to push users. If you know an Apple engineer, please pass the link along.