richardl

Not to beat a dead horse, but WAV was defined long before FAT32 was even a glimmer of an idea. I believe WAV's was based on the IFF file format which originated on the Commodore Amiga. WAV inherits its file size limit from the data structures defined by IFF. That dates back to the early-to-mid 1980s. FAT32 was developed as an alternative file system for Windows 98 that would be able to deal with the large hard drives that had become prevalent. Its predecessor FAT has a 2GB file size limit and a small maximum partition size. NTFS has no maximum file size limit and existed on Windows NT since the early '90s.

Actually the FAT32 limit has nothing to do with the limit in WAV files. WAV is based in IFF and uses a 32 or 31 bit value (unsigned and signed int) to store file size and data chunk size. AIFF suffers from the same limitation. Sonic Foundry (now owned by Sony) developed the Wave64 format that they support in their apps: Vegas, SoundForge and ACID. Those programs will produce a W64 file if the file exceeds the limits of WAV. Here's the spec: http://media.vcs.de/download/content/show/04345113457 (Wouldn't it be nice if other Sony audio software also supported this format?) Sony Wave64 File Format Specification

Thank you for the suggestion. I found the information on dividing tracks in the recorder using the T-Mark button as well as the Edit->Divide option in SonicStage. A bit clumsy, but it should work.

But what about converting longer recordings to WAV files? Has anyone done this successfully? My MD-RH910 can record for 7.5 hours or even 35 hours. But it's useless if I can't split up those recordings when converting .OMA files to WAV files. edit: Never mind. I missed the information on dividing tracks posted above. (They really should say something about this limit in the manual or in a FAQ rather than forcing people to figure it out.) Thanks.

I have a Hi-MD MZ-RH910 which will record about 7hrs 3min on a disk. I've been trying to use SonicStage 3.2 to upload these recordings to my PC. (Sometimes the transfers fail after about 50% is transfered and give me an internal error. But usually they eventually work.) SonicStage can convert the uploaded OMA file into a WAV file. But, for example, a 5 hour (Hi-SP) recording results in a 3+ GB WAV file. My Sony Vegas 6.0 audio editing software will not open the resulting 3GB+ WAV file. According to the Vegas support forums WAV files can not be larger than 2GB due to built-in limitations of the WAV file format. Sonic Foundry (now Sony) developed an extended WAV file format called Wave64 to address this limitation. But it doesn't seem that SonicStage supports Wave64. What gives? How does Sony expect you to use the huge files that you can record and upload from a Hi-MD disc? Why don't the WAV fles created by Sony SonicStage work with Sony Vegas or Sony ACID software? Thanks for any insight into this. - Richard Lawler