Voice memo app wont record for longer then 30 minutes

I'm seeing this as well (the longest memo has been 35:08), with an iPhone 3G 16GB, OS 3.1.

Any ideas?

Could be your phone is out of space, even if it shows a lot of free space. The recording may need contiguous blocks to save (even though it probably shouldn't). I would remove a bunch of music, free up WAY more space then you actually need and see if that works. If it does, then you've got a fragmentation problem, most likely

Sounds like an application limitation... I don't know if there is anything anyone here can do. You might need to request a feature upgrade via Apple's feedback form.

I'm having the same problem since the update. Today I just pressed the home button occasionally to see if it had the microphone, or if I saw my wallpaper I'd unlock and start recording again. It seems like a bug, but I could also imagine them thinking it's a feature, lest someone accidentally record longer than they intended and run out of space and battery power. I wonder if I unlocked the screen occasionally if that would be enough to tell it to keep recording. Also I'm thinking about using a third party app, even though the built-in is so nice.

Recording time is limited only by the phone's available memory. Either restore & see if that fixes the problem or take it to an apple store.

I think you can ignore comments of people who haven't tested and seen this for themselves, they're only stating their ideas of what they think the phone should do.

I just ran several tests on my iPhone and found that unlocking and even pausing and resuming the recording has no effect. Further, I turned off auto-lock so I could see what happens at the 35 minute mark, and the application DOES NOT crash, it simply stops the recording as if you had tapped the stop button. This makes me think it is a new hard-coded limit imposed by Apple. It's the same thing every time, and it never did this before the latest software update.

It occurs to me that they may be limiting the length of recordings so they won't overload the network when you email or MMS them. Of course when you try to download something that's too big from iTunes it just says "connect to wifi" -- I don't see why they can't prompt the same message for uploads.

Message was edited by: Michael Henley

Interesting.

re: seen this for yourselves, since my initial suggestion I'm testing this myself. I don't have a need for 30 minute plus recordings, so of course I hadn't experienced it.

You give good info on how it terminates -- it just shuts down, but you're reporting 35 minutes and the op is reporting 30 minutes. If there is a "minute" limitation, this shouldn't happen. I would be curious to know the SIZE of each of your maximum recordings.

I'm at the 30 minute mark as we speak. ;o) I'll post back in about 15 minutes to report whether mine stopped.

I consistently get 35 minutes but the seconds are sometimes more or less. In iTunes the size of each recording is 74.3MB, Finder says they're 77.8MB, and each one reports a slightly different number of bytes (plus or minus 1000).

Mine stopped at 34 minutes and 13 seconds.

Theory: Variable bit recording w/ a SIZE limit.

Since it won't email the file because of its size, I can't see the exact size, and since I'm not near my master iTunes, I can't figure out the size.

But you guys should compare the file sizes for the recordings that maxed out for you.

I set my phone down next to my desk and I have music playing quietly. I blew into the microphone a couple of times, but other than that the VU meter didn't fluctuate much.

so all the sizes are very close and the bytes are plus or minus 1000 always? They aren't 1024 different?

When I do the math I see 1,204 bytes of difference between the files 77,833,927 and 77,832,723. The larger one is 35:33 and the smaller is 35:05.

Message was edited by: Michael Henley

well, it would've been so much cleaner had your number of bytes been directly divisible by 1024, but if it is being recorded at a variable bit rate, this might explain the slight differences in size at the end of the recording. Although the buffer used to write to the disk "generally" is sized in multiples of bytes. Your finder and itunes is reporting different sizes, probably due to the way apple sometimes says 1000 kilobytes is 1 megabyte, etc (rather than the actual 1024)

well, it looks as if there's a size limitation of about 74 megabytes, but how they used this number is beyond me -- why not 75? Maybe it's exactly 76,000 kilobytes and the plus and minus you're seeing is because of buffer overrun as the code cleans up on exit.