MP3s on Symbian
I have a couple of different phones that run Symbian OS. Nokia ones, of course. Most of them take MMC or RS-MMC cards. The newer ones, the Nokia 9500 and the Nokia 6260, both play MP3s. And since I take my phone everywhere, I use it to play MP3s when I have an dle moment. Specifically, I use it to listen to podcasts.
While that’s fine and dandy, many of the podcasts I listen to are larger than 70 minutes or so, and I can rarely get through one of these programs in one sitting. However, trying to “seek” in a podcast that is larger than 70 minutes or so causes the minute counter to “roll over,” and consequently, fast forward won’t all me to fast-forward past about the 70 minute mark in an MP3 file. Episode 100 of The Linux Link Tech Show was over 2 hours. TWiT has historically been running slightly longer than 70 minutes, though they just started doing “live before an audience” shows and the one at the Apple Store in San Francisco was around 90 minutes.
Thinking this might be a problem with the built-in audio player on my Nokia 9500, I pulled down a copy of Symbian OGG Play, which also has MP3s. It appears to also have the same problem that the built-in audio player has–won’t seek correctly once you are about 70 minutes in. It tuirns out both programs use the same (or very similiar) libraries inside of Symbian. This leads me to believe that the bug lie inside of the MP3 libraries inside of Symbian.
I wonder if Nokia has fixed this problem in their upcoming phones or not.
