1.7.2 seems to crash my 8310 during downloads

[Schnitty]

first off, love the app. if this one issue goes away, i will definitely buy it and will tell all my friends about it.

i have an 8310 (AT&T) running 4.5.0.110. if i have it download new podcasts all the time, i see the phone get slower and slower over about 2 hours and eventually need to do a battery pull. so, i set it to only download when charging (which for me would be overnight).

during the week since i installed podtrapper, every morning except 1, when i go get the phone from the charger, it is unresponsive. my coverage / new mail LED is not blinking, the screen is off, and it does not respond to any button presses. the only option is a battery pull. this is unfortunate, because it means that i can't read any error codes (if there is a place to get the log, i'd be happy to send it your way).

i did look thru this forum, but it doesn't seem like anyone else is seeing this issue. did i miss it? any advice?

[marwatk]

Hi Schnitty,

Couple of questions to help narrow it down:

How many podcasts do you subscribe to?
What other apps do you generally run?


-Marcus

[Schnitty]

i subscribe to 27, most are NPR and almost all were add's from your in-app browser (nicely implemented, btw

other apps i typically have running - gmail, viigo, yahoo mobile, spider solitaire, google maps (latitude), twitterberry, camera, and almost always BMP (i have lots of multi-hour MP3 files not available thru podcasts, and i don't want to lose my place in them - BMP is not as robust as podtrapper for this)

any other info you need (or any experiments you want me to try), just let me know

[Schnitty]

one other data point - it did not crash last night. So i think that puts at at 7 crashes out of 10 nights, roughly.

one thing i have been considering is that since i added almost all my podcasts at once, maybe this is just an issue while if completes the initial download queue, and that if it downloads less going forward, this would be less of an issue.

yesterday morning, when i took it off the charger, the screen lit up, but when i hit a key, it reset. this is a sort of improvement - no battery pull required

[marwatk]

Heh, if I had known how many podcasts people subscribe to I would have thought twice about the thumbnails I subscribe to 12 and I thought that was a lot.

Can you give version 1.8.0 a try after disabling thumbnails? This should make it much less crashy, but I'd be interested to see for sure. You can download it over the air from http://ota.versatilemonkey.com/prerelease/

It definitely may clear up after the initial feed, but it still shouldn't be crashing in the first place

Side note, by BMP I think you mean the built in media player, what do you use that for? Are there files that the File Playback thingy in PodTrapper doesn't work for?

-Marcus

[Schnitty]

ok, i'll try 180. my bberry is policy locked, so i have to wipe it and remove the policy before trying the new version, so i'll check it tomorrow.

in all honesty, i didn't realize that PT could manage playback of other mp3 files. i listen to comm-free howard stern broadcasts (average 4+ hours), and i've been using BMP for that. i'll try it with PT for a while, and leave BMP off (i thought that was the TLA for "blackberry media player")

27 podcasts is a lot, but not all of them are high frequency updates. i have BT Audio on my car stereo and a long drive to work, so i go thru several hours of content / day.

i'll update when i've experimented more

[marwatk]

Hi Schnitty,

If you have to wipe, wait until I push a real version (you'll get a notice inside podtrapper), there are likely bugs in this one. But, it should work much better for you when I release it.

-Marcus

[Schnitty]

you got it. in the meantime, i love being able to play my long mp3's in PT that i was previously playing in BMP. 2 feature requests (let me know if i need them in another forum):

add menu option to delete mp3's from SD card (these are mp3's not downloaded in PT)
add option to continuous play (for example, when one mp3 finishes, it moves to the next one) - sorry if this is already a feature and i just missed it

love the app, thanks for the great support!

[marwatk]

Hi Schnitty,

You should be able to add mp3's to the playlist just like podcasts, let me know if it doesn't work for you.

On the delete thing, I'm hesitant. I'm scare of allowing PodTrapper to delete any file that isn't owned by PodTrapper. Bugs could get hairy (I'm ok if PodTrapper deletes everything in the podtrapper dir accidentally via a bug, but if it did so outside of it that would be bad

Maybe when things get more stable

-Marcus

[Schnitty]

so just a heads up - i think i traced the crashes to podcasts that had gone offline. i had a few (like a football one) that i wanted to track even tho they weren't updating right now, and when i removed them the crashes seemed to go away. so that was pretty cool.

i just updated to 1.8.6 and first request is - sure would be good if i could export the list of subscribed podcasts so that PT remembers them when i upgrade. (remember, i have to do a full wipe in order to upgrade, so it doesn't remember them from the previous list, because that's taken off the phone).

second, i'm seeing a lot of 82b downloads (basically bogus) that are showing as downloaded casts. i can tell them to redownload, but i didn't see that more than once or twice on 1.7.2 and i see like 10 of them on the "all cnet" podcast alone

third, it looks like the fast forward button isn't working quite right. i have a podcast (movie week) that is now at like 101% because i was trying to fastforward to where i had listened previously, and i'm pretty sure it's really under 50% of the way thru the actual podcast

let me know if you want me to list these issues somewhere else. you've spoiled me with the great support. awesome product - i've told lots of people to jump on this bad boy.

[marwatk]

Hi Shnitty,

You should be able to reload your settings via Settings -> General Settings -> (Menu) Restore from backup. PodTrapper (as of 1.7.2 I think) now saves your settings in two places, inside the berry, and it also writes them out to your SD card every time it exits. It keeps one file per version, so it should still be available if you haven't already set it back up. If you've lost them on the same version, and have already exited, though, it will overwrite them. I should (and I'll put this on my list) try to look for available backups if podtrapper comes up without any settings).

The 82b thing is usually a carrier issue. You can disable TCP and WAP downloads (via Settings -> Download Settings -> (Menu) Advanced) and it should go away (or send the logs to me and I can take a look for sure).

The ff issue I'm not sure I understand. Can you elaborate a little more?

Thanks for the feedback, we'll get them all fixed

-Marcus

[Schnitty]

here's a fun one for you:

so i just registered, and when i put in my code, it said it needed to exit and restart. so i watched it exit, and in the course of that, it saved the settings to the storage directory. i realized i'd never seen that before - i think the only times i've closed PT was when it crashed the phone, so i never saw the settings get saved. it's possible that even if you had checked for them, they wouldn't have been there (altho it does always remember my subscriptions, so maybe that isn't the only time it saves them)

one feature you may want to add in the future is for PT to clean up the podcast directory for any pc's that it doesn't have listed in the subscription page. i suspect that part of the reason i ran out of space is because there are all the pc's i had from 1.7.2, and 1.8.6 is just creating new ones (in some cases, duplicates). i'm going to wait a week and go into the folder and just delete everything from before 4/1, and that should free up some space.

the FF issue looks like it was a bad download, i can't replicate it on other downloads

and the 82b thing has not happened again - i think it was related to me trying to subscribe to that large number of pc's all over again when i first upgraded to 1.8.6. i'm a happy camper right now

(side note - i think you may still have the issue with the adam corolla podcast - i was still getting crashes until i deleted that)

[marwatk]

Yeah, that was a big part of the move in 1.7.2 to files that begin with PT_.

On the todo list is an item to occasionally prune orphaned files from there, but I wanted to wait until everyone had 1.7.2 or higher for a while.

I've probably asked for this a hundred times, but which adam corolla podcast is it you were having trouble with? (And why does everyone have issues with that podcast?, heh).

-Marcus

[Schnitty]

this is the one i was using: http://carollaradio.com/

but i just gave up. maybe it works fine, but i just was happy to not have the crashes anymore, so i didn't investigate any further. no crashes for almost a week now - hooray!