Rockbox

While listening to audiobooks in very long MP3 files, over about 4 or 5 hours, the rewind feature becomes increasingly difficult to use. When I rewind a few seconds and release, it goes back to playing about where it was before rewinding. Sometimes it’s even advanced. The amount that it’s off seems to vary a lot.

By the time I’m 10 hours into the file the problem has gotten so bad that I basically can’t rewind to a particular spot. Rewinding a minute and releasing may advance it as much as 2 minutes ahead of where I was, but not every time. It rarely leaves it where I stopped rewinding.

I’ve found that to deal with this I have to rewind several minutes and then fast forward to the spot I want to go. Fast forward seems to work just fine.

I’d like to test this in the Sansa firmware but since there’s no fast forward accelleration in it that would be nearly impossible to do.

By shortening the files I can eliminate the problem but if I remember correctly the MP3 standard specifies files up to (I think) 16 hours long. I usually don’t have files much longer than 12 hours.

These files work fine in most other players. I have hundreds of audiobooks cut to this length and I’ve been using them for a few years like this in various Creative and Rio players with no problems.

The files are CBR 44.1 khz and either 32 kbs or 64 kbs mono files. The problem occurs with both.

I didn’t like the Sansa till I tried Rockbox and I thought I’d found heaven. But this sort of spoils it. It’s still really good but I hope you can fix this.

Thanks,
Barry