Episode Unavailable / Won't play when Subscribed

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Level 1

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Episode Unavailable / Won't play when Subscribed

Hi Everyone,

I could really use some help. Recently, our listeners have had a hard time playing our podcast through the Apple podcast app. It seems to only be the Apple app that is having this issue, saying, “Episode Unavailable: This episode is temporarily unavailable from “Couple Things Podcast”.” This is not an isolated incident with one or two listeners, but everyone who uses an Apple handheld product has this problem. When someone plays it through a third-party app, our website, or a different pod catcher, there is no issue and it plays immediately. While we are happy that there are ways to play our episodes, the majority of our listeners play it through the Podcast App and we definitely want to help those listeners out. It’s only been recently that this issue has cropped up and it doesn’t happen to every episode. It started with episode 138, then again at episode 141, and finally this most recent episode (uploaded today) episode 144. I’m hoping someone can help me since it seems to only happen through the Apple podcast playing portals.

I recently spend an hour with our podcast host website (Squarespace) and was going through everything we could think of, on that end. The end conclusion was that it seemed to be isolated to only the Apple podcast app and only after you had subscribed to the podcast and tried to play it in your library. We actually got it to work on the app when you searched for it and played it directly from the search, but that changed when you subscribed.

I've reached out to Apple already, but haven't gotten anywhere on the issue. Their response was for people who had this problem to submit a ticket every time it happened. I doubt our listeners are going to do that...

Please let me know if you need additional information or if there is some other way we can help.

Best regards,

Ray Loflin

Couple Things Podcast

iPhone X, iOS 11.3.1, Apple Podcast App

Posted on Apr 24, 2018 5:57 PM

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Answer 1

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Roger Wilmut1

Level 10

131,158 points

Apr 25, 2018 1:26 PM in response to Jugggiler

Please don't post in italics, it makes it more difficult to read. Your feed is at

http://www.couplethingspodcast.com/episode-log-blog?format=rss

I can't check it on the Podcasts App, not having an iOS device. As you say, it works fine in iTunes. Testing for byte range requests in Terminal suggests that this is not supported (it's the method used by iOS devices to download the files, consisting of requesting parts of the file at a time rather than the whole thing: it's mandatory).

Checking in Podbase produced an error because it was requesting the file with spaces in the URL rather than the '+' signs. I don't know why it's doing this, but including + signs (or apostophes) in filenames is asking for trouble. You say that some other episodes work, so again I can't explain why that is the case.

First thing to do is to change the filename of episode 144 to something without the + signs - underscores would be OK - and see whether that works. Also ask Squarespace to confirm whether their server handles byte range requests.

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Answer 2

Jugggiler Author

Level 1

8 points

Apr 25, 2018 1:28 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Hi Roger,

Apologies for the italics font. Turns out, as you state, it was the apostrophe that was causing the issues. It's strange because we've had a number of other episodes titled with apostrophies, but 138 seemed to start the chain of not being playable.

Thank you for taking the time to respond with your well thought out answer and helping us solve this problem! You were a massive help and you can count on being thanked in our next episode!

Sincerely,

Ray

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Episode Unavailable / Won't play when Subscribed

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