Podcast audio not playing

Podcasting
1

I am having some issue with podcast audio playing in Apple Podcasts and no response to help emails so thought I"d try here.

Has anyone else successfully got audio to play on Apple Podcasts because all I get is “this episode could not be played. Please try again”.

When I contacted Apple they replied with the following.

I was unable to find that your episodes have byte-range support. This allows your episodes to be listened to in “segments” on Apple Podcasts. Make sure the RSS feed URL, episodes, and artwork are hosted on publicly addressable servers with HEAD and byte-range requests enabled. Learn more about podcast RSS feed technical requirements.

All the episodes are missing a length or duration option that are expected for them to be seen on Apple Podcasts. Confirm that episodes include a valid tag, along with its three required components (URL, length, and type), pointing to an available and supported media asset. For example:

<enclosure url=“https://mypodcast.com/episode001.mp3” length=“5650889” type="audio/mpeg/>

When I test the feed on the suggested websites I get the following errors

Byte-range support: The server for your episodes must support “byte-range requests”, which enables podcast apps to fetch media in chunks. This is required to support streaming, and is required to be promoted in Apple Podcasts.

WARNING: Found 11 episodes with an invalid length. The length should be a nonzero value specified in the enclosure tag, and refers to the file length in bytes.

ERROR: No ID3v2 headers found.
Could not detect bitrate mode (no ID3 tags)
WARNING: The SSL certificate at aya.micro.blog might not be trusted by Apple Podcasts.

Any help with this very much appreciated.

2

Did this possibly coincide with the server that crashed specially with issues making outbound SSL yesterday? Have you tried redownloading? Also the id3 tag thing is maybe a hint the mp3 was produced without some meta data?

3

Hi Jason,

No this has been going on for quite a while. ID3 tags appear fine my end in the mp3 file.

4

Can you link the Podcast RSS so I can look at it and/or the file? mypodcast.com/ is clearly not the actual URL.

5

RSS feed And You Are?

6

I had no problems downloading the latest two episodes on both overcast and Apple Podcasts and both played.

7

Thanks for checking.

It’s always worked on overcast for some reason. But I can’t get it to work in Apple podcast on numerous devices.

8

Had a further update from Apple who have borrowed the issue to the following

Currently, the enclosure tags used to contain your episode URLs are using redirects.

I have also tried to update layouts/list.podcastxml.xml to solve some of the validation issues but this does not seem to update podcast.xml

Update!
Weirdly I fixed this by uploading all of the audio again and the links updated themselves :man_facepalming: