Q: Itunes radio error message.

bru2 wrote:

 

Well it's back to not working.  At all.  Interesting how it worked almost perfect last night into early this morning (local time obviously) and now it's no good at all.  Could it be related to traffic?

 

C'mon Apple get this resolved.

I was wondering about this, but at the time I was able to get it working it was in the middle of the days on a weekend (North American, Eastern Time Zone).  I'd assume that's a fairly high traffic time.   It seems completely random.

RE the playlst tip, I luckily had a playlist with a few of my stations.  Last time genres were working I added more.   But, I find I seem to get getting a lot more buffering errors listening to streams than I ever had before this problem.

If anyone has specific observations or suggestions which might help debug the issue, please suggest. Also please omit general ********, whining and overt aggression. Also, please be concise.

I have a 10:00 AM EDT call scheduled w/ Apple support to discuss this issue.  My observations nd summary of other significant points to date:

1. The problem seems to me to reside in the code that contacts radio stations.  The code has changes since the last version since it now adds a stream count to each radio genre that is refreshed.

2. Some genres fail more consistently than others. This has been noted earlier in the thread.

3. ANY attempt to connect to iTunes via remote causes this error to occur and hangs the whole system. It is not possible to dismiss the error from the remote.

4. This problem has existed for a LONG TIME. Given it's central location in Apple's media management efforts I/we would have expected it to be debugged earlier.  OR AT LEAST some offocial posting from Apple regarding the bug, solution efforts and prognosis.

music_is_her_name wrote:

 

If anyone has specific observations or suggestions which might help debug the issue, please suggest. Also please omit general ********, whining and overt aggression. Also, please be concise.

 

I have a 10:00 AM EDT call scheduled w/ Apple support to discuss this issue.  My observations nd summary of other significant points to date:

 

1. The problem seems to me to reside in the code that contacts radio stations.  The code has changes since the last version since it now adds a stream count to each radio genre that is refreshed.

 

2. Some genres fail more consistently than others. This has been noted earlier in the thread.

 

3. ANY attempt to connect to iTunes via remote causes this error to occur and hangs the whole system. It is not possible to dismiss the error from the remote.

 

4. This problem has existed for a LONG TIME. Given it's central location in Apple's media management efforts I/we would have expected it to be debugged earlier.  OR AT LEAST some offocial posting from Apple regarding the bug, solution efforts and prognosis.

I could give specifics on times that it's down.  But that's been 95% of the time over the last 2 weeks. In fact, this past weekend, mid-day here, was the only times I have been able to open the Classic Rock and Oldies genre in about 2 weeks.

As mentioned above, my only other input is that I also get a lot of buffering going on that never seemed to happen before.  And stations take forever to load sometimes.   There is no network issues at my location, this is strictly an issue with the iTunes radio.   Is anyone else having buffering issues?

If it's any help, I believe my thread was one of the first reporting this error which I first noticed about 7 am on 2/24/12 EST. It was working fine on 2/23. Maybe isolating the onset of the error will be helpful to them.

Also, key is the intermittency where some genres will connect at some times....sometimes after multiple tries. But the vast majority are not working all the time.

Further, initially, some older versions of iTunes were reported as working OK, but then they too had issues.

I also have this error message always coming up and its annoying for me because

it interrupts iTunes being controlled from my iPhone app.

thats really frustrating. i dont listen to any radio streams usually

thanks

iTunes 7.5 has been working fine with radio since I first heard of this issue.

in charleston sc..the following geres work:

Blues

Classical

Country

Hip Hop

RnB

70s

8:50 AM CST, one pass at trying to open all categories, only Ambient, Blues, Sports Radio, '70s Retro and '90s Hits opened.  All others gave connection error.  I imagine if I do it again the results will be different.  Meaning no rhyme or reason to which categories will fail AFAICT.

As mentioned it was working almost perfect for me 12 hours ago.

...waiting for my Apple support phone call...

My guess is that iTunes is overloading its servers by trying to maintain a 'stream count': I had Eclectic working...then I quit iTunes and restarted....no more Eclectic...same old error message....

...oops here's the phone/...

EVERYONE: I JUST GOT OFF A CALL WITH APPLE SUPPORT. APPLE IS FULLY AWARE OF THE ISSUE AND IS WORKING ON IT.

The support guy stated the issue is with iTunes 10.5.3, and agreed with me the problem is related to an application service, likely a daemon in iTunes (on your computer) that provides the radio tuning service.

It is not a server issue. Fiddling with client software reloads, DNS, etc. is not going to fix this problem. The solution will come in the form of a software update.

MalcolmR wrote:

 

EVERYONE: I JUST GOT OFF A CALL WITH APPLE SUPPORT. APPLE IS FULLY AWARE OF THE ISSUE AND IS WORKING ON IT.

 

Thanks for doing the legwork.  I'm glad I didn't do anything to my system.  I will wait it out.  What other choice is there?

...no great news...but I have a better understanding of the process and what I need to do next....

1. I logged an Apple Express Lane case on 3/3/2012 through a Senior Support Advisor (SSA to save typing) Case # 295081089

2. the SSA can (and did) escalate the case to engineering (at that point the SSA can put a 2,3,4 bsiness day priority on it...I do not yet know how this case was prioritized...)

3. When the SSA escalates to engineering, they are supposed to give you their direct phone contact info. I did not get that from the intial advisor but now have it from a second SSA#2 (in CA).

4. Engineering is sort of a 'black hole' form the customer perspective: we wait until the SSA hears back from engineering... then the SSA contacts the person who submitted the case....

For now:

5.  I will call SSA#2 directly tomorrow if I do not hear back today from SSA#1...

6.  I will call corporate headquarters today to discuss the business procedures surrounding bugs like this (pls see my inital post and Simon Templar's posts)....there should be some way Apple provides acknowedgement/prognosis/temp-work-arounds of certain bugs to protect its products and reputation and so we can do other things....

Phoned them, Apple say it's a server issue and they are working to fix it - their own CPU techies have three different Macs and iTunes doesn't work on any of them.

Just wish they'd post that info somewhere so we don't all have to speculate or try to find our own solutions!

...for anyone who wishes to provide direct input to Apple (I do not believe they read User Forums):

http://www.apple.com/feedback/