Q: Ideas about "radio tuning error" or am I off to the genius bar?

@ambercharlie

I've just turned ON and OFF Home Sharing (it wasn't on to start with) and then found all my radio stream categories appear to be loading instantly.

A few points to note:

a) I haven't tried listening to radio in 3 or 4 days, and stupidly I didn't check to see if it was still broken before attempting this solution - so I can't confirm if it was something else...

b) On Friday our ISP experienced DNS server issues and we updated new DNS server IP addresses to use GoogleDNS (set your DNS servers to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to use them). This may also have helped resolve the problem.

c) I have a playlist called "Favourite Radio Stations" containing (yep!) my favourite radio stations. These were unaffected by this 'bug' - only the ability to open a category in Library -> Radio was affected. (Use a playlist to avoid future issues reoccurring, and to make finding your radio stations quick and easy).

d) I strongly suspect the issue to be network / routing / web-service related - in which case it may be that none of the above have anything to do with the problem now being solved for me.

I'd be interested to hear other people's findings...

I went into Itunes preferences..Then selected advanced preferences.

reset all dialog warnings and reset itunes store cache.  hit okay.

Now my internet radio works.

Go into Itunes preferences.  Advanced settings.  select reset warnings and reset cache.  Then hit OK

This worked for me.

I did not need to reset warnings or the cache to resolve, in case others would prefer not to do this.

Try Radio before you do anything, and if it still doesn't work, see @ambercharlie's post above for a solution which doesn't change any of your settings.

Keep in mind that this is an apple problem, that they are aware of it, they have their own machines that aren't working, they have alerted the software engineers and will be fixing it. It is not our problem so it is unlikely that anything we try to do locally will fix it.

No luck with this for me, sadly.

I've had regular problems with DNS routing recently too - perhaps they are connected.

This also worked for me, on a MacBook Pro running Lion, choose "iTunes / Preferences / Advanced" then "Reset iTunes Store Cache:"  select "Reset Cache".  Thanks Mikeinrichmond and CapeGirl.

I've tried all the suggestions in this forum and I still get an error message for a few of the genres (Electronica, Golden Oldies, Top 40, etc.)! Apple, where are you?

I think these fixes are only coincidences, otherwise this would actually work for others.  I'm without radio now for over a week now.  Funny thing is, and as mentioned by others users, the radio stations in playlists work, it's the radio tuning service that's bunged up at Apple's end.  This is the one biggest issue I have with Apple and that is their total lack of support or acknowledgement on issues like this.

I finally gave in and updated to iTunes 10.5.3 (3) and that fixed the issue.  (*An error occurred while contacting the radio tuning service. Check your Internet connection, or try again later.) I've gotten tired of the constant updates and was resisting, but apparently Apple decided to make trouble for us laggards. Not a pleasant development.

Unfortunately for me, I already had the updated 10.5.3.3 when this started.  Hold your breath mate, it'll probably crash soon.  make sure you create a playlist of the station(s) you like.  When it's in the playlist, it seems to work because the stream source isn't the issue.  It's Apple's DNS resolution (aka radio tuning service) that seems to be at the heart of the problem.  Too bad they are too busy making money and not keeping clients happy.  It's the small things (ie lack of service) like this that will eventually kill a company.

I was able to see radio stations for some channels, but not all of them.  Was experiencing this on both a Mac at home and a Windows computer at work...so I knew it was not a network issue or machine specific.  Resetting the iTunes Store Cache (as described in earlier posts) fixed the issue for me.

Clearing the cache is not a concrete solution.  It does not work for me.  I did find out that you can go to the WWW of the radio stream you want (ie in Firefox) and open the stream via VLC.  Once you save the stream link, you can actually drag it into a playlist in iTunes and listen to the stream.  Like I said before, this is completely a radio tuner service's naming resolution (DNS?) issue at Apple's end.

Apple, why don't you at least acknowledge this?

It's not a big deal now, but keep ignoring your end-users and you'll see that it only takes small corrosion to take large things down.

After dealing with this issue for the past week, it appears to have cleared up this afternoon, as my radio function is working again.  If you're still having problems, try downloading iTunes 10.6 that was just released today.