8130 Bugs?

[tmm]

First, I need to thank you for making this software. I have been looking for something just like it for a long time.

I have a Blackberry 8130 Pearl (Verizon), and noticed a couple of things that you might want to address.

I started listening to a downloaded podcast, then stopped. The Podcast Status screen shows: 1 New, 1 Unfinished, 9 Not Downloaded for this particular podcast. I tried to get the "unfinished" status to either reset or change to "finished" by advancing to the end of the podcast, and then by listening to the last 30 seconds or so. No luck. It still shows as having 1 unfinished podcast episode.

I would like to be able to download more than 2 podcast episodes for each podcast series, but, that feature does not seem to work. I changed the "Settings" tab to 6 for Max to auto-download, but that did not seem to change anything. I did select "Update Podcast" on the menu.

As for future features, it would be very nice if you could auto-delete episodes after they were listened to, or, after a certain number of days. For example, I use Juice as my desktop podcatcher, and for most podcasts I have it set to auto-delete after 14 days.

Also, it would be nice if I could enter podcast URLs without the http:// prefix, i.e., just enter something like "www.podcastdownload.com/podcastlocation".

Finally, if you want to get superambitious, figure out a convenient way to allow us to browse to a podcast feed and then click on it and have it automatically added into Podtrapper's list.

Again, thanks very much for developing this program. It already is very good, and I am sure you will turn it into something that is really great.

[marwatk]

Hi tmm,

Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into the 'unfinished' bug right away. That shouldn't be happening. (It should stop showing unfinished if you get to 95% listened, which you can force by using the right most arrow while the media is playing).

The download more than 2 episodes thing will only work for new episodes it sees. Behind the scenes, when it's downloading podcasts it marks as many as that setting is set to for 'Auto download', the rest are set to 'No auto download'. Right now, editing the setting doesn't alter which current podcasts are set to auto and which aren't, though I'll probably change that as it makes more sense to do so. But, at any time and for any podcast if you get all the way into it's details and hit the menu there's a "Restart download" option that will force the download of any episode (also useful if a download is corrupted for some reason). Though, now that I say that and try it, it seems you need to hit it twice for them to start downloading right away (I'll fix that today).

Episodes should auto-delete once they reach the "Max unfinished to keep" threshold that can be set in the "Edit podcast" screen for each podcast. (It defaults to 4). So when it downloads a new episode, after the download is complete it looks at the older episodes. If it sees any that have been listened, it deletes those first to try to get under 4 total (or whatever it's set to). If it runs out of listened ones it'll start deleting the oldest unlistened ones to get under the limit. Let me know if this functionality isn't working for you or you were meaning something else...

I'll add the podcast url without http prefix to my todo list, thanks for the suggestion!

Browsing feeds is on my todo list, but I haven't found a source of data that would be worth using. If you have a site or source of podcasts I could look at let me know, but it's definitely on my todo list once major functionality is done.

Again, thanks for all the suggestions, they'll definitely help me make Podtrapper better for everyone. Keep it coming if you have any more ideas Also, let me know if my responses didn't answer any of your questions (sometimes I misinterpret).

-Marcus

[tmm]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the response and the thorough explanation. I understand now what is going on with the "Auto Download" option.

What doesn't seem to work (or maybe I'm missing something) is trying to get an undownloaded podcast to download. I don't see a "restart" option for the older, undownloaded podcasts. To give an example of why I might want to do that, sometimes I listen to Buzz Out Loud, and they will reference something that came up on a show a day or two earlier. It sure would be nice to be able to force Podtrapper to download a specific show that it did not download earlier. Or, in addition, to find an already deleted show and redownload it. I checked the Show/Hide Deleted option, and while it does identify episodes that are deleted, it does not offer a redownload (or restart download) option.

I did a little more testing of the unfinished issue. I could not get it to show finished after manually advancing a show to the end of the podcast. More interesting, I did try listening to short podcast and letting it run uninterrupted from beginning to end. Even when it finished on its own, it still shows as unfinished. Based on your message, I suspect this may be an issue related to OS 4.5, which Verizon recently released, and so I upgraded from 4.3 within the last two weeks.

BTW, if I do delete a show, either unfinished or finished, it does seem to properly update the New/Unfinished/Not Downloaded count.

I should have found the auto-delete setting (Max unfinished to keep setting) on my own by doing a little more exploring. Thanks very much for pointing it out. That is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you! I'll let you know if it is working correctly after a few more days of downloading. For now, I just downloaded your program last night, so I don't have enough of any particular show downloaded to try out the auto-delete functionality.

I'll look around for a feed source and let you know if I find a good one. For my other mp3 players, I generally use either iTunes or podcastready.com to identify promising podcasts, and then find the original source and copy that link into Juice. (I know, it seems like a lot of work, but those are the most comprehensive and reliable sources I've found so far for podcasts.) I also have myPodder (from podcastready) installed on one of my mp3 players, and do like that software for easily aggregating podcasts. But, it has some other issues that I don't like related to playback pauses that it causes. I won't go into that problem, because it is not relevant here.

Anyway, thanks very much for being so receptive to supporting and improving Podtrapper. I'm really looking forward to giving it a thorough testing over the next few days!

Tom

[marwatk]

Hi again,

I think I found part of the issue with the 'restart' option. I only put that menu item inside the episode itself, not when viewing the list of episodes. (It's on the screen that shows the show description and such). I'll add it to the episode list screen also to make it a little friendlier.

The unfinished thing I'll have to check out, it's probably a bug...

-Marcus

[marwatk]

Hi tmm,

Just wanted to let you know the unfinished bug is fixed in version 1.1.0.

Thanks for using it, let me know if you run into anything else.

-Marcus

[tmm]

Hi Marcus,

I downloaded 1.1.0 and tried it. Now I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that this version does seem to resolve the unfinished problem, as well as adding the ability to redownload previously downloaded episodes, and it autoappends the "http://" prefix properly to

The bad news is that now I can't play podcasts anymore. When I click on an episode to start it, I get the message "Error playing this episode: null". I redownloaed one episode to see if that would cure the problem, but it did not. One thing I noticed is that when I view the episode, all of the parameters seem normal, except for the length, which is listed as "null". I also tried playing the episodes in the Blackberry Media Player, and that did work fine.

Another potential problem relates to downloading episodes from a new podcast. I added two new podcasts to my subscription list, and tried to download an episode from each series, but for some reason, neither episode will download, which seems strange. I'll try to play with that more later to see if there is some setting I missed.

So, that's the current status here. Hope your Thanksgiving holiday was a very pleasant one.

Tom

[marwatk]

Hi Tom,

Is there a particular podcast that doesn't work for you, or is it that none of them work?

If you subscribe to a new podcast does it exhibit the same behavior?

It's odd that you're able to play podcasts in the media player, it shouldn't be able to play them because of the file extensions.

What kinds of files do you have in your podtrapper directory on the media card? Are they all .dat files, or all .mp3, or a mix?

Can you also use the "Send Logs" item from the download manager ("View Downloads"->"Send Logs"->"Send").

I'm sorry for breaking it for you, though I'm running it on an 8130 and haven't had any issues :/

We'll definitely get it fixed for you.
-Marcus

[tmm]

Hello again Marcus,

Here is a little more information about the not playing situation. I had subscribed earlier to the Slate Daily Podcast and the SDR News. Each had 6 episodes downloaded showing in the list. They did play before, but, after upgrading to 1.1.0, all of the previously downloaded episodes show a length of null, and no longer play. (By the way, I did check the feeds for each directly, and I see no undownloaded new episodes, so I can't test Podtrapper's behavior with newly downloaded episodes of these series. I assume each will release a new show tomorrow.)

After the upgrade, I did add Business Week Cover Stories and Buzz Out Loud to my podcast series. At first, neither would download any episodes. But, when I checked an hour or so later, I saw that the Business Week podcast had downloaded 4 episodes (and did not download 157 others!), while the Buzz Out Loud podcast had not downloaded anything (and shows 10 not downloaded). So maybe there is a problem with the BOL feed.

I did try to play a couple of the Business Week episodes, and both gave me the "Error playing this episode: null" error. But, even more strangely (to me) is that the length of these episodes is correct, at about 15 minutes each.

As for playing shows in the Blackberry Media Player, it definitely does work. I did play one of the Business Week episodes there with no problem, and that definitely was not on my Blackberry before I put the download feed into Podtrapper. In playing some more to try to isolate the problem, I noticed that the "All Songs" menu item for BBMP does not show all of the podcasts that should be on the BB. But, after I try playing an episode in Podtrapper, it will show up on the BBMP list, but, not before. So you are probably right about the issue with the extension not being the same, because newly downloaded episodes do not show up on that list until I try to play them.

To make things more mysterious, I connected the BB to my computer to look at the extensions of the files. I saw that the files listed in BBMP had mp3 extensions, and the others all had dat extensions. But, what was even more weird is that I deliberately tried playing all of the episodes in Podtrapper to see if that did anything. When I looked again at the file extensions, all were now converted to mp3. I hope that points you in the right direction.

Finally, I did send you the download log, so perhaps that will provide some additional clues.

Please don't worry about breaking things. I know it can sometimes take a little while to get everything tuned properly, especially with a complicated program like this.

Tom

[marwatk]

Well, the length showing correct on some podcasts doesn't help us, unfortunately, since podtrapper uses the length from the episode list if there is one (some podcasts don't have them, so that's why it takes playing an episode for the length to show up sometimes).

The BBMP thing will seem a little counter intuitive. I designed podtrapper to try to hide podcasts from the normal media player, it's extremely annoying (to me) to ask it to shuffle songs, be happily listening to music only for the next 'song' to be a 90 minute podcast

This is sounding more and more to me like the player instance that podtrapper uses just got hosed somehow. Have you tried pulling the battery and seeing if that fixes it? (Lame solution, I know, but if it works it may be worth a try).

It sounds very much like podtrapper is correctly seeing the files, renaming them so the media player can see them (podtrapper uses the BBMP behind the scenes), and attempting to play them, but the player is freaking out for some reason.

Try rebooting, in the mean time I'll add some more logging so that maybe we can capture exactly where it's failing.

Thanks for being so patient, I really want it to work for everyone

-Marcus

[tmm]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for all your help tracking down this latest issue with the media player. With your assistance, I was able to track down the problem as being one of improper permissions setting on my 8130.

When I went into Options, Application Options, Applications, I found that I had permissions settings for Podtrapper set as:
Connections: Allow
Interactions: Custom
User Data: Allow

When I changed the Interactions setting to Allow, everything worked perfectly. The media player plays, pauses, and changes to new podcast episode playing without a single problem. So my list now looks like:
Connections: Allow
Interactions: Custom
User Data: Allow

Again, thanks for your help with this and all the other issues. I really appreciate it.