Large WAV Files -Sound Forge - PC - MAGIX Community Forums Archive

Subject:Large WAV Files Posted by: c5nest Date:4/21/2003 12:52:48 PM I purchased Sonic Studio for the purpose of opening large audio files and splitting them into smaller files before editing. I work on a powerful video/image editing XP Pro system (Xeon dual) with plenty of RAM (1.5 GB) and multiple NTFS-formatted drives. Sonic Studio refused to open a 3.9 GB WAVE file and gave me error messages indicating the file was corrupted. The file was fine. I was forced to open the file into a video editor or employ a shareware utility to split the file. Your readme documentt specifically states: "Full support for files larger than 4GB". Apparently this is not the case.
Subject:RE: Large WAV Files Reply by: MarkWWWW Date:4/22/2003 7:35:56 AM The largest size for a legal .WAV file is about 2GB. (Logically it should be 4GB, but because Microsoft chose to make the size fields signed 32-bit values it is only about 2GB rather than the 4GB it would have been if they had chosen to make the size fields unsigned values.) SoFo has devised their own format (.w64) for dealing with WAVs of larger than 2GB. (The .w64 format is basically the same as the WAV format but with 64-bit values used for the size fields to allow much larger file sizes. There are a couple of other differences, but that is the most important one.) It might have been nice if Microsoft had chosen to adopt this method to allow large audio files but, being Microsoft, they've chosen to do something else instead. It seems that their preferred way of working with very large audio files is to use .AVI files with no video stream, just an audio stream. .AVI files do not suffer from the 2GB limit (though they may run up against the limits of filesize imposed by the file system in use - 4GB under FAT32 for example).

Subject:Large WAV Files

Posted by: c5nest

Date:4/21/2003 12:52:48 PM

I purchased Sonic Studio for the purpose of opening large audio files and splitting them into smaller files before editing.

I work on a powerful video/image editing XP Pro system (Xeon dual) with plenty of RAM (1.5 GB) and multiple NTFS-formatted drives. Sonic Studio refused to open a 3.9 GB WAVE file and gave me error messages indicating the file was corrupted. The file was fine.

I was forced to open the file into a video editor or employ a shareware utility to split the file. Your readme documentt specifically states: "Full support for files larger than 4GB". Apparently this is not the case.

Subject:RE: Large WAV Files

Reply by: MarkWWWW

Date:4/22/2003 7:35:56 AM

The largest size for a legal .WAV file is about 2GB. (Logically it should be 4GB, but because Microsoft chose to make the size fields signed 32-bit values it is only about 2GB rather than the 4GB it would have been if they had chosen to make the size fields unsigned values.)

SoFo has devised their own format (.w64) for dealing with WAVs of larger than 2GB. (The .w64 format is basically the same as the WAV format but with 64-bit values used for the size fields to allow much larger file sizes. There are a couple of other differences, but that is the most important one.)

It might have been nice if Microsoft had chosen to adopt this method to allow large audio files but, being Microsoft, they've chosen to do something else instead. It seems that their preferred way of working with very large audio files is to use .AVI files with no video stream, just an audio stream. .AVI files do not suffer from the 2GB limit (though they may run up against the limits of filesize imposed by the file system in use - 4GB under FAT32 for example).