Large Wave Files

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Coriolanus
Posts: 181
Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 3:50 pm

Large Wave Files

Post by Coriolanus »

I know Goldwave cannot open a file larger than 4GB - I have fil that is 5.2 GB so I split it in half with SLICE into equal parts. But still Goldwave cannot open it - what could be the problem after splitting the file?

Is there a program that can slice large wave files into sizes Goldwave can handle?

Will this restriction ever go away?
Gord
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by Gord »

From what I've seen, a WAV file cannot exceed 4GB under any circumstances. The WAV file specification uses 32 bits to store the length of the file and if that is interpreted as an unsigned integer value then the file cannot exceed

(2 ^ 32) - 1 = 4294967295 bytes

which is 4GB.

I'm fairly certain that GoldWave can handle more than 4GB of audio data at one time, but it would have to come from a format that could handle larger file sizes. For example, you could have a large MP3 or FLAC file that exceeds 4GB when it is uncompressed.

Splitting a WAV file into chunks won't work because a valid WAV file has a header record that contains the total size of the file. If you arbitrarily split that file into two pieces then

- the first piece will have a header record with a length value that exceeds the total size of that file, and

- the second piece won't have a valid header at all.
Coriolanus
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by Coriolanus »

OK I understand the header issue. What I was doing was converting audio to WAV with audio converter program. Suddenly a few of those WAV files were larger than 4GB. What I ended up doing was coverting them to MP3 files and then I had to split the MP3 file if I used 128 bit for the conversion - -- not if I used a lower rate - but these are only audio book.

Thanks for explanation about why you can't split Wav Files -
Last edited by Coriolanus on Mon Aug 15, 2011 3:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
DewDude420
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by DewDude420 »

Coriolanus:

You REALLY should remove the note about what files you're converting and with what. Those two words, put together, will get Chris sued for DMCA violations as that particular company is REALLY looking for stuff.
Coriolanus
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by Coriolanus »

DewDude420 wrote:Coriolanus:

You REALLY should remove the note about what files you're converting and with what. Those two words, put together, will get Chris sued for DMCA violations as that particular company is REALLY looking for stuff.
Thanks - I just removed it.
Irvin Cee
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by Irvin Cee »

I had some issues in the past with corrupt header in long WAV files.
I managed to open them in Goldwave as RAW format.
But I needed to write "NULL"s in the header using a binary file editor, so Goldwave would not open it as a WAV.

It where not files longer than 4GB but larger than 2GB. The DJ software I used did not split on 2GB and had wrote corrupt headers into a file larger than 2GB.
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Coriolanus
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by Coriolanus »

Can you convert RAW files to WAV?
GoldWave Inc.
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Re: Large Wave Files

Post by GoldWave Inc. »

Yes, if the audio isn't encoded and you know the format/attributes of the raw audio data. You can specify those attributes when you open the file, then save as Wave.

For Batch Processing, you need to add a format for the file type on the "Undetectable Types" tab under Options | File Formats so that GoldWave will open the file automatically.

Chris
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