Itunes radio not working. Is it possible for itunes to 'know' when a user captures music streams?

Factual Questions
1

Hi,
First of let me confess that I have been lurking on and off on this board somewhat religiously since I found out about it in fall of 2002 or 3. I spend waaaayyyyy too much time reading this stuff, but its so interesting! I know this is a lame first, but I had reasons for not wanting to post ( written below) .

Anyway, here is the problem, and I know from a bit of googling that I am not the only one to experience it. However no one seems to have a solution. My itunes streaming internet radio no longer works. It gives me the error message
“To access to this site, you need to log in to area
‘Members Only’ on pri.kts-af.net” I have been to that site and it brings me to iRADIOmast - home, where they then want me to pay to subscribe. No, thank you.

I have a mac, and I have had one for years, never having experienced this problem until about a year ago.
No one else on my network (both windows based) is experiencing the problem and all firewalls are turned off. I have un-installed any and all itunes plug-ins.

I know this is crazy, but suppose a user had been recording music streams for years. Not even directly through itunes, but only using itunes to find the sites of the radio stations and listen for a bit because itunes has so many stations listed, and they are neatly categorized. Is it possible for itunes to block that user from seeing the list of internet radio stations it displays as a punishment? Or is that just some sort of fallacy of causation?
As I dimly understood it, capturing a digital stream would be analogous to recording FM radio onto a tape in that the information is streamed out in one direction - toward the end user - and since the user would be sending no information back, no one would know what the end computer did with it. Also, would this be a waste of time, money, and effort for something itunes has little vested interest in correcting?

So my questions are: Has anyone else experienced this problem? If so is there a way to fix it?
Is there an internet radio player for mac that has the built in breadth of stations that itunes has?
Finally, hypothetically, would itunes bother to discourage or ban a user who captured radio streams?
Also, I know it doesn’t matter, but for the record my reason for lurking rather than posting: I do sit here and read these threads every day and I think of much more (in my mind) interesting questions to ask all the time. However at first I was discouraged because I didn’t want to pay, and then I was discouraged from posting because of the vitriolic and petty attitude with which some posters get attacked. These snide remarks seemed much more interesting to read than be subjected to, some people just took it way too personally for me. So please, feel free to mock and insult for any grammatical or logical mistakes I may have made. Surely there are other lurkers who feel the same way(?)

Thank your for your time, and I have about a billion other questions I’m looking forward to asking

2

Welcome in. I have no idea of what I am talking about, but unless you are playing the music through the speakers and recording it with a microphone, never assume that the sender doesn’t know what’s happening with what you are receiving. I would not be surprised to learn that iTunes knows what other software is running while it plays music and knows it is being recorded.

That said, it sounds like a crazy way of going about it. It is more likely that iTunes just knows that all the plug-ins are disabled and that is why it is not letting you use some features.

3

A quick Google search turns up things like this: http://forum.maccast.com/lofiversion/index.php/t17194.html
Which shows that you aren’t the only one who’s had this problem.
It’s not punishment for recording, something is just broken.

4

Hi, I don’t know if you ever figured out how to deal with the ‘log in to area “Members Only” on pri.kts-af.net’ error message, but I came across this same problem today and I couldn’t find a solution anywhere on the web. However, I did figure out what was causing this problem and I’ve fixed it on my Mac. My guess is that, like me, you downloaded the iTunes plugin from iRADIOmast at some point, and then (perhaps also like me) forgot you had done that. Anyway, that plugin is the culprit here.

The installer script for the iRADIOmast plugin modifies the hosts file on your computer and tells it that pri.kts-af.net should point to the iRADIOmast website instead of the iTunes DNS site (which is tunes.apple.com.akadns.net, by the way). To fix this, you can go into that hosts file and take out that redirect. (There may also be an uninstaller script from iRADIOmast but I deleted all the files I used to have pertaining to iRADIOmast so that wasn’t an option for me.)

There’s a good set of instructions on how to edit your hosts file in OS X Leopard at http://decoding.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-in-mac-os-x-leopard/. I don’t think I could improve on those directions except to say that instead of adding new lines to the file (which is what’s described there), you will be looking for the line that gives the ip address for pri.kts-af.net and deleting it. To do that, use your keyboard arrows (not a mouse or trackpad) to position the cursor at the beginning of the line you want to delete, then press control-k to delete that line (or “cut text” in the parlance of the Terminal editor). Then continue following the directions to save the file, close it, and refresh your DNS cache.

At that point, you should be able to fire up iTunes and voila! Radio stations! I hope that helps.