9

I have tried many voice recording type applications and the best I have found only allows me to do a recording upto a maximum file size of 2.1GB. I can do many of these 2.1GB recordings as I have a fairly large SD card.

On one of the applications I have tried, the developer has specifically said that his/her app has no recording length limit

So my question, does Android have a built in 2.1GB limit per file?

ale
  • 19,723
  • 34
  • 110
  • 159
oshirowanen
  • 1,079
  • 3
  • 14
  • 25

1 Answers1

13

Short Answer: Yes

More Detailed Answer:

The file size limit is not something specific to Android, it is a limit of the File System.

It may "technically" be a bug in Android though, as FAT32, which is what the file system is for the sdcard, should have a file size limit of 4GB ((2^32)-1 = 4,294,967,295B) but it looks like the filesystem on Android is android is actually using a limit of ((2^31) - 1 = 2,147,483,647B). Which means they could be using signed integers, instead of unsigned integers for the addressing on the filesystem.

Ryan Conrad
  • 22,673
  • 9
  • 58
  • 81
  • 2
    The yes only qualifies for devices with integrated SD cards, aka not Google's Nexus line (Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7) amongst others. And most probably not for most Jelly Bean devices (/mnt/sdcard is a symlink to /data/media which is not FAT) – ce4 Aug 12 '12 at 21:33
  • Do you have some document or evidence about this limitation? – BuffK Jul 14 '20 at 07:21