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iTunes radio stops streaming on its own

It seems to happen randomly. Usually an iTunes radio station will stream for hours, but sometimes it will simply stop for no apparent reason. When it stops it usually stops repeatedly after playing for only a few minutes. It's not the "rebuffering stream" message; it simply stops as though I pressed the stop button. Pressing play restarts the stream as though nothing had happened.

So is this an ISP issue, or the radio streaming source?

Powerbooks  iMacs  iPods  Airports  Appletalk printers , Mac OS X (10.4.11),  24 years Apple!  "it's" means "it is"  "lose" is a verb  "loose" isn't

Posted on Jul 27, 2009 5:47 PM

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69 replies

Oct 7, 2011 3:16 PM in response to martinz

martinz wrote:


and yes, it's only streaming web radio.

Sad to say, I've the same problem with iTunes 10.4.1 on web radio and still no solution or reason found.😟


Had posted a own question about that and still no answer.


As my wireless run as designed and fast too, I can confirm that this "hang" of iTunes is not a wireless issue.


I had mentioned the wireless cause a lot of people blaming iTunes when a stream drop while a album is played. On such cases it's mostly the wireless.



Lupunus

Oct 9, 2011 8:09 AM in response to lupunus

I was having the same issue for the past few months and was convinced it was an iTunes upgrade bug. I switched my ISP last week and have not had the issue since. I can also now stream Hulu Plus in HD, which I couldn't do before without hiccups and I was on a 20Mbps plan.


Try running some traceroutes to your streaming radio site and see if you get routed someplace out of the way. If you can, compare those to traceroutes on other ISP's in your area.

Oct 9, 2011 8:36 AM in response to dwaldhei

dwaldhei wrote:


I was having the same issue for the past few months and was convinced it was an iTunes upgrade bug. I switched my ISP last week and have not had the issue since.

As wrote before, I have that too on stations which stop the stream regularly after a fixed time and also if the ISP renew the IP (every 24 h once) or when the steam stopped by closing clam shell of the Mac.

It's definetively in 10.4.1

By the way, I did not have that issue with 10.4.x before the feckin useless new version of "home sharing" which came with 10.4.1.


Lupunus

Dec 11, 2011 8:57 AM in response to John Galt

John Galt wrote:


...

I can find no correlation to this behavior to any iTunes version. There is a correlation to general internet slowness, though, so I don't believe it's a problem that Apple can fix.

I'd just like to confirm that this behaviour is not unfamiliar to me at all, as my household has used iTunes to stream radio every day for quite some time now (about the past 2 years). This particular issue has reared its ugly head more and more often in recent months and has finally spurred me to Google the problem, and thus I came across this thread.


I'd like to point out that this happened across multiple operating systems (Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Lion, Windows Vista, Windows XP), different hardware (MacBook Pro, Toshiba laptop, Acer netbook), different ISPs (a DSL provider in BC, Canada, as well as a completely different DSL provider in Ontario with a different backbone), and different router setups (from Linksys to Siemens to direct connection to DSL modem). This is mostly what makes me suspect it is an iTunes software problem, and not an Internet connection or other problem.


Furthermore, as many users have already noted, VLC is not prone to "giving up" the way iTunes curiously is. Even with gaps spanning minutes of zero Internet connectivity, VLC will patiently wait until it can continue streaming again, and when connectivity has been restored, VLC resumes streaming. iTunes tends to give up relatively easily, and unfortunately there are no options to tell it to retry or anything like that.


Since it seems Apple has - as yet - no interest in doing anything to correct this behaviour, it seems other people have. I just came across an AppleScript at Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes that seems to have been written to address just this issue: Nudge Stream URL. Most unfortunately, however, my home's current music hub that runs iTunes for streaming radio is an Acer netbook running Windows XP, and Doug's AppleScripts are not compatible with Windows. Alas!


I implore Apple to take this issue seriously so that we can continue using our favourite media player to enjoy streaming radio.

Feb 22, 2012 1:18 PM in response to vtowel

I have had trouble with iTunes version 10.5.3 stopping after hours of seamless streaming. When I try restarting the radio station, it repeats a short section that it had played before stopping. Then, it gets stuck.


My solution was to open iTunes advanced preferences and rest the iTiunes store cache. That seems to have freed up iTunes again. I was able to restart the radio station with no problem after restting the cache.

Apr 12, 2012 4:06 AM in response to vtowel

Which version of iTunes do you run on all these machines? I have never had problems with iTunes 9.0.2 and iTunes 9.2.1 I am using on two of my Macs (both running OS 10.4.11). The only version with which I have problems is iTunes 10.3.1 that was native to my Lion based MacBook Pro: with this version the radio stream stops about 3-4 times within 3 hours I usually run it, while it runs uninterruptedly on my older machines I mentionned above (using different versions of iTunes 9)! I haven't upgraded to 10.5.3 or even 10.6.1 yet to see if this could solve the problem.

iTunes radio stops streaming on its own

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