My podcast feed crashes Apple's podcast app

Question

My podcast feed crashes Apple's podcast app

I've had a problem with my podcast. I've had many different people complain to me that when they click the lock button after starting my show, the phone seems to completely shut down. It sits like that for 10 seconds or so, and then boots back up to the home screen. You can still listen to the podcast, it just happens every now and then when you click the top lock button while listening.

It's so bizarre. I've never had this problem with any other podcast. But my feed seems to cause this problem for many different people with different operating systems.

I'm using SoundCloud to host my feed. (I have a different podcast and have never had this problem.) I changed the SoundCloud feed over to Feedburner to see if that would help, but it doesn't seem to have worked.

Has anyone else had this problem?

iPhone 5s, iOS 9

Posted on Sep 29, 2015 4:46 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 29, 2015 4:49 AM in response to postscriptaudio

I'm not in a position to test this, not having an iOS device - you might do better to ask in the iPhone forum. If you give the details of your podcast someone may be able to suggest a reason. In the meantime if you care to post the URL of your podcast I will have a look at the coding and a media file on the offchance that there is an peculiarity there.

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Answer 2

Sep 29, 2015 4:55 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Hi Roger -- thanks for the swift reply!

Here's the Feedburner link: http://feeds.feedburner.com/PostScriptPodcast

And here's the original SoundCloud feed: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:156648456/sounds.rss

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Answer 3

Sep 29, 2015 5:05 AM in response to postscriptaudio

The most likely explanation lies with the media files. When you enter the URL of your top media episode's file in a Safari on a Mac it downloads, rather than playing in the browser as it should. Normally this prevents the file from playing in the iTunes Store (though in fact it did play when I checked it) but I wouldn't be surprised if it threw an iPhone - that expects to use the 'byte range requests' method to download part of the file at a time rather than the whole lot, and it's not getting it here. You need to set each file not to download. eiznem has posted the process:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6523821?answerId=26564459022#26564459022

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Answer 4

Sep 29, 2015 5:36 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Thanks Roger. Very helpful. I will test that out to see if it works. Much appreciated!

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Answer 5

Sep 29, 2015 3:41 PM in response to postscriptaudio

I tested :

iOS 9

iOS 8

And:

Streaming

Downloaded

Manually subscribing with URL

Subscribing through iTunes

And I didn't have any issues. I recommend gathering more info and creating a ticket here:

http://support.itunespodcasts.com/

-Fan

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