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Subject:Converting 4 gig wav to mp3
Posted by: LeinaBean
Date:11/8/2004 6:28:39 PM

We have a 4 gig (8 hour) wav file (16-bit, 44.1k sampling rate) that we can not open or convert. HELP!
Subject:RE: Converting 4 gig wav to mp3
Reply by: Rednroll
Date:11/8/2004 7:49:37 PM

What Version of Sound Forge are you using and on what OS is it running on?
Subject:RE: Converting 4 gig wav to mp3
Reply by: Chienworks
Date:11/8/2004 7:58:20 PM

I thought the .wav format was limited to 2GB. This file was probably created by some software that didn't adhere to the .wav specification and wrote a non-standard file. It will probably have to be opened in RAW mode, skipping the header information. Hopefully someone will post soon how to do this; it's a bit beyond my experience at the moment.
Subject:RE: Converting 4 gig wav to mp3
Reply by: rraud
Date:11/9/2004 8:11:39 AM

If you just need to convert to an mp3, though I have not used it with a real large file, you could try the WinLAMEr3 http://winLAME.sourceforge.net . I prefer this sometimes to SF's for it's batch process ability and many more conversion parameters.
Subject:RE: Converting 4 gig wav to mp3
Reply by: mpd
Date:11/9/2004 2:29:45 PM

The file size and chunk size fields in RIFF (of which WAV is a subset) are 32 bit values, so in theory file size is about 4G. Even though negative file sizes make no sense, I have seen implementations that use signed variables for these fields. That may be where a 2G limit is coming from.

If you know any programming language that supports binary I/O, WAV headers are pretty simple, so it should be fairly easy to convert a WAV to a raw format.
Subject:RE: Converting 4 gig wav to mp3
Reply by: Chienworks
Date:11/10/2004 6:18:41 AM

Sound Forge can do this directly by opening the file in RAW format. You simply have to tell it what chunk size to ignore in the beginning and what the format of the data is. It's that easy. However, i personally don't know the chunk size details, and no one but the original poster can determine the format to use.

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