The Old Time Dragnet Show With Adam Graham

Okay, this isn’t a Dragnet episode, I wish it were something so fun. But I’ve gotten a couple reports from listeners who are unable to download the show using the Zune Marketplace software.

Getting an e-mail from one listener, I thought it was probably just some issue with him and Zune, we couldn’t do anything about. However, receiving a second e-mail with the same symptoms indicated there might be a large problem.

Unfortunately, it’s still a software problem at Zune, that I can’t do much about other than Google to see what the general Zune issue might be. I have several pieces of podcast software on my computer that I check regularly including Zune and I can still download episodes fine, but these listeners aren’t able to and it may be a broader problem.

In both cases, the listeners weren’t able to download episodes of Dragnet, so they unsubscribed from the podcast and resubscribed and still aren’t able to get episodes.  And I checked and the enclosures look fine to me.

Before, I begin to write on this, let me offer a very simple confession. I listen to podcasts on my computer. I’m rarely out and about, though I am out more than Nero Wolfe. I live a short distance from work and do a lot of activities around the house. My longest prolonged absence from home is to go to church, and listening to podcasts in church kind of misses the point of going. 🙂 When I do download files, I just directly copy them using my computer onto a small generic MP3 player.

All that to say, I’m providing all the knowledge that Google can provide and no particular expertise. From what I’ve Zune 4.0 has had some issues with podcast support.  One issue I found that was kind of similar was written by a gentleman who accidentally unsubscribed for a podcast and resubscribed. He found that Zune would no longer sync his podcasts up:

Even though I told the Zune 4.0 software to unsubscribe & delete the podcast the files were never deleted by the Zune software I had to do that manually.

when I resubscribed to the podcast the Zune software had this crazy idea that the files for it were still on my computer & refuses to download previously downloaded episodes.

So, one possible solution in our case may be that either old podcast files are still on the computer, but they haven’t synced up with the Zune player after the unsubscription and resubcription and it may be that with this week’s episode of Dragnet, things could return to normal on their own.  (A guy can hope, right?)

A second option that I found to fix Podcast problem is to downgrade your Zune software. At the Dark Zune blog, its reccomended that you do this if you’re have podcast problems. Proviso: Don’t do this if you have Zune HD. You’ve been warned.

A final option is to download a new podcatcher. Actually, the second most popular podcatcher on the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio is not Zune, but rather Juice from Ipodder.  Juice is a light open source application that’s only focused on podcasts. The downside of Juice is that it doesn’t automatically sync, however a couple different sites that had suggestions on how you could do this.  You can read here and here to find a couple different schools of thought.

The show feed will be necessary if you use Ipodder and here’s the URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/OldTimeDragnetRadio

That said, the thread is open for any other ideas or suggestions.