Subject:Sound Forge 10 can't open 8-hour file

Posted by: Angels

Date:12/13/2013 9:06:00 PM

Is there a limit to the file size Sound Forge can load? I have an 8 hour 44.1 kHz 32-bit float stereo file (almost 10 GB) that Sound Forge 10 tells me it can't load because it's an "unsupported format".

I can open this file in Wavelab 8. Why can't SF load this file? And does anyone know if SF11 has the same problem?

TIA.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge 10 can't open 8-hour file

Reply by: rraud

Date:12/13/2013 11:03:20 PM

"it's an "unsupported format".
Well what format is the file then ?

Subject:RE: Sound Forge 10 can't open 8-hour file

Reply by: Angels

Date:12/14/2013 5:20:56 PM

It's a WAV RIFF file, nothing special outside of being 32-bit float and extremely large. Like I said it opens in Wavelab; turns out it also opens in WMP and VLC.

This appears to be a SF-specific problem. I can actually create a file that big within SF by copy paste and render it to MP3 (which I did as a test to see the file size it would render to), but for some reason it just can't load in this file.

Could this is a limitation of a 32-bit executable? Or maybe there's something in the file header it doesn't like? I generated this file rendering a project from Nuendo 5.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge 10 can't open 8-hour file

Reply by: Chienworks

Date:12/14/2013 7:21:59 PM

Officially, WAV files are limited to 2GB. There is a 31-bit value in the header that specifies the size and 2GB is the highest number that value can store. That isn't to say that some programs won't handle larger files, but Sound Forge probably expects the file to be standards compliant. Of course, this is a WAV limitation. Other formats can handle larger files, and compressed formats will be much smaller for the same duration which is why you could create the MP3 file.

SonyCreativeSoftware titles have a W64 format which is a WAV file with a 63-bit header value, which can store Petabyte size files. Unfortunately this format may not be compatible with other company's programs.

You probably have a couple of options. You could save the file in smaller parts in whatever program you used to create it. Or, you could open it as RAW in Sound Forge. The tricky part of this approach is that you have to tell Sound Forge the proper file specifications such as bit depth, word size, channels, byte order, sample rate, etc. You also have to tell it how many bytes of header information to skip over before it gets to the audio.

Subject:RE: Sound Forge 10 can't open 8-hour file

Reply by: pwppch

Date:12/15/2013 8:25:41 PM

You shouldn't have to do this, but try renaming the file with a .w64 as its extension.

Also, if wave lab can read it, try saving it as a wave64 file. I believe that WaveLab supports our 64 bit wave file format.

Peter

Subject:RE: Sound Forge 10 can't open 8-hour file

Reply by: Angels

Date:12/15/2013 11:45:37 PM

I didn't realize that WAV still had that size limitation; Nuendo must be ignoring it completely when rendering. Thanks for chiming in, Peter & Chien. Renaming the file didn't work, but Wavelab does in fact export in w64, so after doing that, Forge was fine loading it in. I tried to save it as wav, and got the "out-of-spec for wav" notice.

So these other programs are ignoring the header size data. There's a switch in Forge's general preferences: "Allow Wave renders up to 4GB". Could we change that to "Allow Wave renders over 2GB" and add a switch that says "Ignore Wave header file size on load" ? ;)

So Microsoft doesn't have an official proprietary audio container that can hold more than 2GB of data?

Thanks for the help and explanations!