Google Podcasts App problem?

Hi Kim,

Can you send us a link to the episode that you’re running into issues with on Google Play? Haven’t heard of any other incompatibilities, so would love to check it out.

Also just to confirm you get the error on all episodes but one, or just this one?

The only one that is working is Episode 60, dated Feb 21. The rest are initially buffering, then they pop the error.

We have now tested it on two more Android phones – so we have a total of 2 US phones and 1 Canada that are all exhibiting the same symptoms – playing in Google Play Music but not in Google Play Apps.

https://play.google.com/music/m/Ixunz2fl4ok6excl6bbwajbdpoy?t=Mobile_Wallet_Marketing_Made_Easy

My show is exhibiting the same problem, apparently on all episodes https://wheelbearings.media/feed/podcast. It works fine all other podcast apps including apple podcasts, overcast, pocketcasts and google play. In Google podcasts it says something went wrong. This episode couldn’t be played, please try again later.

Hey I wanted to see if anyone on this thread has been able to figure out this issue yet? I too am encountering this issue and it is super frustrating. I actually operate two podcast and one of them streams the other returns the issue stated above.

Unfortunately, I have contacted Google Support and no one seems to know a solution.

radio show returning errors: Monstercat: Call of the Wild

We are still seeing this problem as well with the Google Podcast app but still not with the Google Play Music app, I just checked the latest 5 episodes to see if there was any change in the output versus the two apps.
Very strange.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 4 months ago by kimstuart.

It is very strange. I get the same issue.

My feed works fine on Google Play Music but not on Google Podcasts. If I had to guess it has something to do with how my server is set up to stream audio files however I cannot find any documentation elaborating on what might be causing it.

Really wish to get this sorted.

Hi there. Are you seeing this in the browser or just in the different Android apps? We’re working on a way to test this predictably but sounds like it’s a bit of a tough thing to nail down. If you have any more details about how/where you think this is happening we’d love to help find a solution with you.

Hey! I am currently seeing this on the android app, I have not actually found a way to view Google Podcasts on the browser so when I do I can let you know if the problem occurs there as well.

Something worth noting which Kim also mentioned, is that although our podcast doesn’t stream on the Google Podcast Android App it DOES play after you download the file.

Same problem here. We’re unable to play any episode on Google Podcast, and *only* on Google Podcast. No probs whatsoever with other Podcast Apps nor playing via browser.

It seems that the Google Podcast app for Android fails when trying to buffer the episdoe. Could it possibly be related to the way the data from the file is provided to the app, since it’s not a direct link but it passes through the SSP plugin logic?

Hello there!
Receiving more and more complains about this from listeners of our podcast.
What I can confirm is that the error appears on all sorts of different Android smartphones using the Google Podcasts app, and only if the user tries to stream any episode.
If the user “forces” the download of the file onto the device, it succeeds and once the file is stored on the device, the playback through Google Podcasts interface works OK.
Would it be possible to give this some sort of priority? Non being listenable through the official Google app for Podcasts is quite a setback!

Hi all, yes thank you for the updated information and we do have this in our queue to take a look at. As you can imagine with this being somewhat irregular and tough to replicate this is a bit tougher than the normal bug to nail down. Will give an update here as soon as we have more info for everyone.

Same issue with another podcast: “The Classicist with Victor Davis Hanson”. It works fine with ‘Google Play Music’ app but fails with ‘Google Podcast’ App. Same message: “sorry something went wrong.” All episodes work in GPM. Two most recent episodes work in GP (July2, July3). All prior episodes failing in GP.

@kimstuart: I’m doing a little research into this. Can you confirm whether or not you are running your feed into GP through Podtrac (or maybe some other proxy tracking service)? Also, what device and Android version are you experiencing the issue on?

@marcozambi: Can you share a link to your show? And are you using a proxy tracker of any kind? Do you know specifically what devices your users have had failures on?

So far I’ve tested on two different Android devices and versions using Google Podcasts and I could play both of the shows mentioned in this thread. Both of these were on Android 8+ though. I’m currently looking at some of the file details of a couple episodes from the shows above to see if there’s anything that looks unusual about the way the files themselves are encoded.

@thequicksilver — we use SSP ‘straight out of the box’ so to speak, no proxy, no tracking services, we do use the stats module from SSP.

Variety of Androids that we’ve had the issue with, I can’t find one that will play the episodes, old or new.

google pixel 2 android version 8.1.0
older model HTC with 6.0

are two that I have in the office

For our testing/debugging purposes it would be helpful to know what versions of android you (or your listeners) are running when they’re having this issue. Similarly for the Googe Podcast app.

Thanks for everyone’s help as we try to nail down the root cause here.