Problems with Podcasts in iTunes and Podcast App

Question

We're receiving a number of reports from people that our podcasts play for a minute or so and then loop back to the beginning. We're getting the report from multiple users, for different podcast episodes and occurring at different times within each episode.
We've seen it happen once or twice ourselves, but it is very difficult to reproduce. Unfortunately we've received enough complaints that I know this is a real problem that a lot of people are having. They're even leaving negative comments for us in the iTunes store because of it.
Because we've been having trouble reproducing the problem, it's hard to zero in on what's happening. All the complaints I've seen so far seem to be from people using iOS devices and listening through iTunes or the Podcast app.
Is anyone else experiencing these complaints?
The podcast in question is "BackStory with the American History Guys".
Thanks.

Answer 1

You are using Feedpoxy for your media files; your latest episode file has a 301 ('moved permanently) redirect to
http://media.blubrry.com/backstory/backstoryradio.org/files/2012/10/Been-There-D one-That_-Historical-Reenactments.mp3
This then has a 302 redirect to
http://backstoryradio.org/files/2012/10/Been-There-Done-That_-Historical-Reenact ments.mp3
This sort of thing is asking for trouble with podcasts, and may not be helping, however it does play OK in iTunes: the fact that the issue seems confined to iOS devices, and from your description, suggests that it is the dreaded 'byte-range requests' problem. The iPhone plays podcasts by using 'byte-range requests', which means calling for part of the file at a time rather than the whole thing. Unfortunately some servers don't support this, and there were an increasing number of complaints that podcasts which worked elsewhere weren't working on an iPhone.
A Terminal test for this suggests that your server is indeed not accepting byte-range requests: I'm afraid that the only ways out of this are a) ask the people running your server to enable it, or b) find another hosting service and make sure before committing that they can handle this.
To test for this on a Mac, open Terminal and enter curl -I -r 200-300  followed by a space and the full URL of your media file. Success is indicated by lines in the response similar to this:
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 101
Content-Range: bytes 200-300/46077596
This was not in the response to your file.
(Caveat: if you are going to use Terminal, stick to entering exactly what is specified. Don't improvise: you can do a lot of damage very easily. This test is quite safe.)