#1

I’ve recently made some 6.5hrs sound files for a video installation running from some Rasberry Pi based units. The audio was rendered using some Max for Live Devices and Kontakt inside Ableton & of course I quickly discovered (don’t think I’d made anything longer than an hour before) that there is a 2GB wav file limit so the 6.5hrs were unexportable as a wav. I got around it using highest quality mp3, but not ideal. Has anyone come up on this issue and found a way around it with a non lossy export format?

#2

I had thought .wav was limited to 4GB, or 6 hours 45 min of stereo 44.1kHz / 16-bit?

#3

I’m not sure, it’s a bit foggy. Possibly an Ableton restriction the 2gb. I was trying to do 48/24. I’ve seen mention of a broadcast wav format doing 16tb & certainly my zoom recorder seems to have not trouble with super long wavs. Possibly I just should have bussed out to that in realtime!

#6

I’d think that 2gb limit is dependant on how the drive is formatted - fat32 has that 2gb limit, although most modern formats don’t have that.

#7

Give FLAC a try! Ableton suggests it as a workaround for the 2gb limit they have imposed for other file types.

PS I’m blown away that the WAV header is still 32bit… there is a W64 header format that’s 64bit and allows much longer lengths, but I guess nobody adopted it? :-/

#8

You could try Core Audio Format. I’ve used that to record long multitrack files in SuperCollider and that might be an option in Ableton.

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#9

Thanks, I’m on Mac, seems to be file format

#10

I wonder if you can get it in there as a export format, will give it a whirl be useful for many reasons

#11

Ah, never heard of that though I see Logic can do it as export, will see if Ableton might be able to implement.

#12

Yes, FLAC is natively supported by Ableton: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/211427589-Supported-Audio-File-Formats#native

AFAIK iTunes was the only major audio software that for some reason refused to support FLAC natively. Anyway FLAC is open source and very widely supported…

#13

Beautiful! I had no idea.

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