Chapter 32. Smoke and Sweet Leaf
Chapter 33. In Which Plans Go Poorly
Voice Credits
Nathan Lowell
Norm Sherman
Chris Lester
Amy Watkins
Hughes Hilton
Bryan Lincoln
Nobilis Reed
James Durham
Charles Blanchard
Big Anklevich and Rish Outfield
Sound Credits
Beth Quist – Grace
Jami Sieber – The River Between, Tell It By Heart
Kevin MacLeod – Heartbreaking, Interloper, Sneaky, Ghostpocalypse – 4 Temptress, Ghostpocalypse – 6 Crossing the Threshold
Digital Juice
Sound Snap
The Free Sound Project
Sound Dogs
Artwork by Sarah Cloutier. To view the complete illustrations, purchase the book at one of the links above. This week, I’m including the complete version of the cover illustration. Click to make bigger.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Trying to download episodes has become an exercise in frustration. At best it is now taking me 30 minutes to an hour to download an episode as I constantly have to restart the download. If it pauses or times out in iTunes, it starts re-downloading from the beginning into the same file (does your feed support byte-range requests?), making the audio jump from wherever it stopped back to the beginning, and resulting in files that are 3 to 4 times the normal length. Even trying to download from the website doesn’t work as it just constantly times out (I’m in Canada, with a good connection, and it is only your podcast that is such a problem). I love the podcast, but spending up to an hour trying to get a successful download through manual restarts is just ridiculous, and extremely frustrating.
After some sleuthing, this might be the problem:
Hi, Xenko. You didn’t finish your post there. What did your sleuthing reveal?
For Byte-range requests – what is that, and how would I check? I use the Blubrry Powerpress Plugin to create my feed. I don’t hand-write my feed. If Powerpress supports it, then I have it.
You’re not the only one still having this problem, although I routinely get emails and messages from people who tell me they were having problems and now suddenly aren’t. I have not been able to detect any common denominator between people who have problems vs those who don’t, nor can I understand why some people suddenly have no trouble when they had been struggling for weeks to download every episode. For me, using DoubleTwist on my Android phone, episodes download immediately. Dido iTunes on my computer. So I cannot reproduce the problem.
When this book finishes, it’ll be on Podiobooks (the moment, the second! if I can swing it). In the meantime, I just mirrored eps 9-11 in Dropbox. That’s completely different hosting on different servers. DB doesn’t support RSS Feeds, but it should work as a mirror. I’ve posted links just above the voice actor list on the most recent eps. Try that, and let me know if you’re still having trouble. If you need earlier episodes, let me know.
Sorry, HTML tags messed up in my last post.
http://forum.blubrry.com/index.php?topic=3828.0
I’m not positive this is the issue, but it is a feature that all new podcasts to iTunes required (as of iOS 6), but old ones were grandfathered.
Interesting. That is almost certainly part of the problem. I started having trouble with the feed around that time – lots of weird, apparently unrelated, issues. Lately, a lot of people using iTunes have told me they’re having trouble. However, that doesn’t explain why you and a few other can’t even get the files to download off the website. That should not be affected by the new iOS/Powerpress comparability problem. I wonder if I am dealing with multiple unrelated issues – bandwidth spikes with the release of CC4 + a new iOS problem. It would explain why I can’t get anything to make sense. Plus, I’ve had some hints that my host may be throttling me on purpose, because they’re aggravated that I’m taking up too much of my “unlimited” bandwidth.
I’m not sure whether you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, but if you do, you probably saw that I have mirrored the files for eps 9-11 in Dropbox. The links are under the artwork, but before the voice actor list. Dropbox will not support a podcast feed, and the hosting/bandwidth I have there would not be nearly enough to handle my entire feed even as a mirror. However, it should be able to handle a few files. If you have trouble downloading those, definitely tell me. Dropbox is a completely different server.