corman

I have problems listening to extremely long, single file, WMA format audio books. It appears that the standard progress bar in WMP 10 (at least on an X50V) can only be dragged to about 6 1/2 hours. In addition during normal play, when this time period is reached, the book ends and WMP drops down to the next item in the playlist (if any, or just ends).

I discovered a workaround which required modifying the code for the standard WMP 10 skins. This was also necessary with other available WMP 10 skins. I needed to modify the length of the seek bar in the code. Initally I was reading a 10 1/2 hour book and I need to shorten the skin code for the length of the seek bar to about 125 pixels. Later on I found I could not reach the end of the next book which was over 22 hours. I needed to shorten the bar to about 65 pixels. So it appears that the legth of the bar is inversely proportional to the lenght of the WMA file that can be played.

Unfortunately, the length of the bar is so short now that it is difficult to get to a specific spot very accurately. My guess is that since most audio files are short song clips or at most 70 or 80 minute CD length files, that few have experienced this problem, and MicroSoft may never have even tested it.

Is this problem unique to the VGA capability of the X50V? Has anyone else experienced it? Do any skin coders have any better suggested solutions? Can anyone think of a way of breaking a super long licensed WMA file into multiple shorter ones?