Voice memo app wont record for longer then 30 minutes

Thanks - I just used the Feedback link to report it as a bug, and referenced this topic.

Others - the direct link is http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html, I encourage you to use it to report this as a bug as well, so perhaps we can get it resolved.

Good idea. One thing to keep in mind is that even if Apple agrees and changes it that won't happen for many months. So if you need more than 35 minutes now you will have to go with a 3rd party app such as iTalk.

I filed a bug report with ADC.

Radar # for reference?

Hi everyone

I'm having the same issue of voice memos shutting off at ~ 30-35 minutes. I thought perhaps I was having an isolated problem, so I googled the issue to see what info I could find and saw this discussion thread, so I guess I'm not the only one. This 3.0.1 new "feature" is so disappointing! I really liked using the voice memo app to record business meetings and college lectures. Now, the app is practically useless to me. boooooooooo!

I too have submitted a feedback form to the iPhone team.

Bring back unlimited voice memos, Apple!

MDO

Just wanted to add my voice to the growing number of people saying that the Apple voice memo app won't record for longer than 30 mins since upgrading to 3.1.

I'm a writer and journalist and I had, prior to the 3.1 upgrade, been very impressed with the Voice memo app, which happily recorded hours on end with no problems. I'd been telling people that it was a great app and that I was going to retire my old iPod&Belikin TuneTalk set-up in favour of the voice memo app.

But since the 3.1 upgrade it's been unusable. Most of my interviews last for several hours - I'm currently researching a book and need to do extended interviews - and it's just not practical to have to string together 4, 5 or 6 or these 30 mins recordings.

Please Apple sort this out - along with the random coma/shutdowns I've been experiencing post 3.1 - as I was really loving the voice memo app.

Dan

I also came across this topic after Googling for this "bug" or "new feature". I used to record up to almost 3 hours using the Memo Recorder before and now it just stops after about 30+ minutes.

Looking at iTunes, ALL the files are 74,3 MB in size, that's what I used to search on Google and that's what let me to this topic. 🙂

I'dd like to add myself to the list of people in this topic who feel a bit disappointed about this new limit, please bring it back the way it was.

I already have a third-party app I didn't use anymore before running into this problem, but I really like the iPhone's native Memo Recorder because it can run in the background and let me check my mail and stuff while maintaining the recording session.

Just adding my support to this thread as I too am having problems with voice memos since updating to 3.1. Also having intermittent coma problems. Went to the Apple store today who said to restore and set up as new iPhone. Needless to say it didn't make any difference.

"Having the same problem. The problem with 3rd party apps is the file size. I just downloaded Italk and am recording on the high quality setting and will try their Wifi process for downloading to the computer, but my experience with similar apps that use AIFF is terrible."

VR+ directly records into MP3.

Note that I haven't tested the CPU (and, consequently, the battery) usage of VR+. I will tomorrow for sure - hope it isn't much worse than that of the built-in Voice notes, which delivers excellent results (see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10337941#10337941 for my benchmarks).

I have finished testing: starting from 100% and a reset iPhone, running in the background most of the time in airplane mode with minimized backlight and default settings (read: no VAS; 64 kbps recording); after 48 minutes:

3G S was at 90%
3G was at 84%

That is, these figures are WAY worse than those of the built-in Voice Memos. Interestingly, while the latter doesn't cause excess battery usage on the 3G, a third-party MP3 encoder (as one would except) already does.

Same problem here. I recorded a 1h30m lecture on 09/09/09, now it gets to 34:51 and it stops automatically. I'm going back to iTalk, but why should Apple break something that works? Sounds like a bug to me, everyone should feedback this to Apple, since lecture recording is advertised as a feature, and lectures last much more that 30 mins.

I'm too having this same problem. Before the 3.1 "update" i had no problems recording my 1hour 10min classes. I was amazed , of how easy I could use it, and even when my recordings on my iPhone wouldn't load and play I could easily track them down with iPhoneExplorer and convert them from .mov top .mp3 files.

In my case it automatically stops recording at about 32 minutes. This has even cost me money, I downloaded the iTalk app but i can't transfer the recordings to my pc because I don't have a Wi-Fi connection. Then I PURCHASED the SpeakEasy app with which I could supposedly sync my recordings straight to iTunes, but for some reason it doesn't seem to find my recordings on my BackUp folder.

Apple definitely dropped the ball in this one, I mean, why even tell us to update our iPhones if you hadn't even checked if there were any bugs, especially as big as this one.

oh and another thing...can anyone link me?? where can i report this bug?? maybe if enough people report it it'll pressure them to fix this quickly.

www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html is where to report it. From the symptom, however, I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't consider it a bug. For a hard limit the app must have been modified to set a limit. This sort of thing doesn't happen by accident.

Well, just to keep hope alive, it COULD be a bug, say, if the developer set a temporary hard limit on size as he/she was working other stuff out and forgot to remove it. Or they are experimenting with limiting the amount of space apps can consume and then didn't remove the limitation on this particular app that you would EXPECT to consume space. Something like that.

They DO advertise that you can use the Voice app to record lectures and stuff, and I doubt they think the average lecture lasts for less than 40 minutes, so I would imagine this is either a bug or an errant feature enhancement. ;o)