[LAU] large .wav file in Ardour - problems

Renato rennabh at gmail.com
Mon Oct 11 20:58:11 UTC 2010


Hello, 
I made a large recording in Ardour. The .wav file is 4.9 gb. I'm
having problems with it and I don't understand if the file is faulty
or if it's something related with the wav format, which seems to have
some problems with large files (or am I wrong?).
I suspect it could be faulty because the recording in Ardour
actually went on untill there was no more disk space, at which point it
obviously stopped. So maybe there could be something wrong in the
header?

The symptoms are: in Ardour (2.8.11 BTW), with a "small" zoom (such
that I can see all 5 hours of recording in one screen), I can see the
contour of the waveform only to a certain point, at approx. 1h 30m, and
thereafter only silence. 

Strange thing number one is, if I zoom in, at a certain point the
waveform appears also for the second part.

Strange thing number two is whenever I move the transport bar to a part
of the region in the "fake silence zone" and hit play, the transport starts moving from there, but the
audio is actually playing *from the beggining* of the region (so more
than 1h and 30m before). If I pause, move the transport bar and hit
play, the audio now starts from where it had left... 

Strange thing number three is that strange thing number two stops
happening if I put the transport before the 1h 30m point, hit play, and
go through that point (after which I hear silence)

Do I have any chances of getting back the whole audio file?

BTW I tried opening the original .wav with mplayer,vlc,audacity and
mhwaveedit and all see the file terminating at that critical point.


Also, what precautions should I take in the future when I'll have to
record such long sessions?

thanks for any help,
renato


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