Help

Your feed isn't loading

Take a deep breath. Converting the files takes time.

Have a cup of tea and refresh your podcatcher in 15 minutes to an hour (or just enjoy your tea, most podcatchers do this automatically).

If it still doesn't work, ask Dr Pod for help by referring to this list (we're working on improving both how many weird feeds we support, and how helpful we are when we know we can't handle a feed… but being Zen has been distracting us from coding recently, and Zhaozhou answered: “Wú”):

Symptom

Podcast feeds show 500 (server) errors

Cause

Feeds (rss, atom, xml, etc) that are invalid enough that we can't parse them (we can handle lots of invalid feeds, but some are funky-invalid)
There's probably never going to be anything we can do about these fellas.

Symptom

Podcasts are available immediately, but are not actually shifted

Cause

File formats that we can't convert yet
We'll probably start supporting these soon (for values of "soon" that are intentionally undefined).

Symptom

Podcasts show 503 (temporary) errors… and no matter how much tea you drink they keep showing 503 errors

Cause

File locations that change - libsyn and many other content distribution systems change file locations around, probably so that they can track who downloads what… or to stop people like us doing stuff like what we do;
We reckon that we could fix these… but our appetite for getting sued is small, so we probably won't.
Talk to them, and explain what we're doing over here. We'd be happy to help them - we want the world to be PodShifted, so we'll teach them how to do this themselves if they don't want to go through us.

Symptom

You subscribe to a PodShifted podcast in iTunes but iTunes keeps redirecting back to the original

Cause

Dudes who don't want us doing stuff like what we do, probably so that they can track who downloads what… as "File locations that change" above, or, dudes who have recently changed their podcast address;
iTunes supports a tag like <itunes:new-feed-url>, which they describe here. It instructs iTunes to actually subscribe to the address in the tag, not the one you told it to. Since we try to do as little as we possibly can to feeds we shift, we don't remove that tag, and iTunes unshifts your feed.
We could remove this tag in our shifted feeds… but our appetite for getting sued is still small, so we probably won't.
Talk to them, and explain what we're doing over here. We'd be happy to help them - we want the world to be PodShifted, so we'll teach them how to do this themselves if they don't want to go through us.

If it still still doesn't work, feel free to drop us a line.