Voice memo app wont record for longer then 30 minutes

well i guess i'll have to downgrade to 3.0.1 again. Does anyone know whether or not doing this will cause my iPhone to lose its data??

Everyone should send his feedback to Apple at www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html as Lawrence Finch said. Maybe they don't consider it a bug but, as others have correctly reported, this is a feature Apple is advertising: http://www.apple.com/iphone/apps-for-everything/students.html

This is not good news for Apple, sounds like false advertising to me, so I'm pretty sure they will fix it in the next update. But in the meanwhile what do you consider the most similar alternative to Apple's Voice Memo? I don't like the idea of downgrading.

I'm with Everett. Something like this could easily slip past QA as it's so time-consuming to test. Also, having looked at Apple's code before, I can tell you that they write in such a way that this procedure would fail gracefully as observed. And yet, if they consciously made the change, why not alert the user to what's going on?

ken840 wrote:
But in the meanwhile what do you consider the most similar alternative to Apple's Voice Memo? I don't like the idea of downgrading.

I was happy with iTalk for a year before Apple added the built-in recorder, and I still use it most of the time. You need to transfer your recordings via WiFi, and you can import them into iTunes or not as your needs dictate.

Thanks, I'm trying it now!

I installed the iPhone OS 3.1.2 and tried the Voice Memo app to see if Apple patched it. 35 minutes and the app still quits by itself stopping the recording.

Epic fail.

sad thing for me is that I can't use the iTalk app because I don't have a Wi-Fi connection and that's the only way to transfer your recordings to the PC, and I purchased the SpeakEasy App instead and it is even worse than the Voice Memo app itself, they made me download the SpeakEasy Connect software which would supposedly transfer the memos straight to iTunes, but it doesn't work either, so I'm stuck with the recordings on my iPhone without being able to transfer them to my pc.

Now I have to do it by myself, I used a cable to plug the iPhone to the pc, play it and record the sound with my pc's built-in Sound Recorder

EPIC FAIL APPLE, EPIC FAIL

Message was edited by: intelekto09

@intelekto09
It took a bit of digging, since I remember seeing this a couple weeks ago, but I finally found this for you:
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/09/25/mac-101-create-a-wireless-network-between-mac-and -iphone/
I haven't read everything, but I think this is what you need: create a wi-fi network mac->iphone without a wireless router

Message was edited by: ken840

+1. Still stopping after ~34 minutes after upgrading to OS 3.1.2. Very disappointing as I was rapt with the Voice Memo app originally and used it for interviews. Now it is practically useless for this purpose.

Just to add in my two cents. I've had the same problem with my voice memo. It stops recording at about 35 minutes when I'm in class. I reported the bug, or whatever it is, to apple iphone support. Hopefully, it'll be fixed soon!

wow thanks man

I have two iPhones 3G: one on AT&T carrier in the US and one abroad, both have this problem with Voice Memos on OS 3.1.x (OS 3.0.x worked fine with recordings longer than an hour).
Apple iPhone Product Specialist confirmed that this is not intended behavior; here is a quote from his email:
QUOTE
From: …@apple.com
Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009
Subject: Case 136251929
Aidar,
I got a response back from my engineers. They let me know that there is no hard or soft limit put onto the iphone for voice memos. They suggested that you restore the iphones on a new user without syncing anything over to it yet and then trying it out.
I did try it on my iphone also while we were on the call and then it continued after we disconnected and mine got into an hour and some odd minutes.
Please try the restore with a new user and try the restore as new again
ENDQUOTE
The suggested solution did not help, but I think Apple Product Specialist might have used newest Apple iPhone 3GS model (with more memory onboard to accommodate possible memory leaks), while both my iPhones are older 3G model.
Today the carrier of my non-US iPhone 3G whom I contacted back in September got back to me via email, saying that they got response from the developers that this bug will be fixed in one of the future releases (unfortunately it is not fixed in 3.1.2).
At this moment it seems the only thing that could be done is to ‘vote’ for this apparently known bug of OS 3.1.x on 3G model to be fixed earlier than OS 4.0 by submitting feedback to http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html as was suggested earlier in this topic.

Very interesting, Aidar, thank you for contributing that. The comment about it working for a full hour on the 3GS is interesting as that could compound the difficulty of catching it before release. Also interesting that the engineers in question hadn't heard of or looked into this bug yet.

That's an interesting theory about a memory leak leading to a crash. Hadn't thought of that. But people on this thread have been reporting the issue with both the 3G and 3GS and everyone is reporting the same length of recording (approx.) and about the same file size.

I suspect the product specialist is fudging his results a little since this bug is eminently re-creatable. Or he did it on his phone which hadn't been upgraded and he terminated after he'd reached an hour or so. Some of these guys aren't so sharp, despite the "Genius" sobriquet.

Usually, if the results aren't 100% re-creatable, you get a BUNCH of posters saying "it doesn't happen to me, you must be doing something wrong" like with the "coma mode" issue. But this one appears to be a legitimate software bug, not just something that happens to people with god-knows-what combination of things on his/her phone leading to a subset of users having the problem.

Of course, even those who like to chime in with "it doesn't happen to me, so you must be a mor0n" probably wouldn't take the 30+ minutes to check it out. hehe

I temporarily take back what I just said re: 3G & 3GS/Memory Leak. I only see two people listed on this thread who say they have the 3GS. Lawrence, you're one of them. Did you actually take the time to try to record more than 35 minutes?

I'll test with my wife's 3GS when I get home.