Podcast working everywhere except Apple Podcasts

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Level 1

8 points

Podcast working everywhere except Apple Podcasts

Hi,

I have been having some trouble getting my latest podcast episode to work on the apple podcasts app. I haven't ever had any problems with the previous 3 episodes so this is quite confusing for me. When I click on the episode I get the infamous "episode is unavailable" message.

I have tried streaming the episode via a third party app and that seems to work fine but when I have tried playing the episode via the Apple app on various other Apple devices (4 other iPhones) I have had a mixed result with most of them getting the same error message.

I am hosting the podcast through a Squarespace site.

This is the podcast link on iTunes: Wax Lyrical by Bahath on Apple Podcasts

I have a feeling that it may be some kind of bug specific to the apple podcast app and the devices I used because I know the app has had a lot of issues. Although I am not sure. I was wary about sharing the episode to followers just in case the issue was something that was affecting all devices and was something I needed to fix from the source.

It's been really frustrating trying to figure it out if anybody had any pointers that would be fantastic.

Thanks!!

Posted on Sep 11, 2018 9:27 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Roger Wilmut1

Level 10

131,158 points

Sep 12, 2018 12:10 AM in response to wax1237

Your episode plays OK in the iTunes Store on a Mac and when subscribing in iTunes. I'm not in a position to check on the Podcasts app, not having an iOS device - you could ask in the forum for that. It does look as if your server may not support 'byte range requests', the method used by iPhones to access media files, which is mandatory - though if you were always using Squarepace I would have expected your feed to be rejected in the first place.

The other possibility is the filename. The previous episode has a normal file name but this one is

That%27s+What+Friends+Are+For+-+Episode+4+-+Wax+Lyrical%3F+2.mp3

%27 is an apostrophe and %3F is a question mark. These don't upset iTunes but they are not a good idea and I woujld advise removing them. You don't want question marks in a URL ever (it indicates a following code) and the codes themselves might possible be a problem. You should keep your filenames simple (nobody sees them) - remove both codes altogether, and stick to just letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores.

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