conversion to wave file size limited?
Hi guys,
I appreciate your time and, although I’ve learned alot trying to solve this problem, I still haven’t solved my problem. It seems there is a limit of 60 minutes when I try and open and work with a WMA file using N-Tracks. I have a digital voice recorder and it saves to a WMA file and can record for 277 hours, lol, I realize that is impossible, but I was wondering if there is a setting I can change to give me a bit more elbow room- to have a larger working file in N-Tracks.
thx
~CHZ~
Not sure I understand your problem, but have you tried converting the WMA to wav before importing into n-track?
Are you sure you have plenty of free disk space too…
when I take the 2 hour recording from my digital voice recorder and open it with N-Tracks, it only shows 1 hour of the 2 hours that was recorded.
~CHZ~
What uncompressed format is the WMA getting converted into? There is a limit ot the file size of WAVEFORMATEX PCM files. It can hold only up to a 32 bit unsigned integer’s worth of data regardless of the actual wave format. That’s about 4 gigs. Maybe that’s the limit…though I doubt it.
I believe it is converted from a WMA to a wave file in order for N-Tracks to modify and work with. Although wave files are large, my experience has about an hour wave file @ 16 bit 44khz would be about .75 gigs.
just to be clear, the file that is created and shown, when I open a large WMA file, say 2 hours in length, in the N-Tracks wave window stops at 59 minutes and 59 seconds.
N converts WMA to wave before it can play it - a 1 minute 20 second WMA track shows size as 1.317 meg - when converted to wave it now shows 14.337 meg that roughly equal to 10 megs per minute disk space or 600.000.000 meg bytes per hour or (if my calcs are correct) 6 gig which is to much for disks formatted with FAT 32 - (max file size of a single file cannot exceed 4 gig)
if hard drive is formatted to NTFS then the maximun file size is limited by disk volume size -
using the above a a rough (very) guide then you have to have 12 gigs free space for N to convert your WMA file to wave using NTFS -
Dr J
(ueless at maths but it should give you an idea)
Thx Doc, nicely done,
I have the NTFS file system with 94 gigs available per window in bottom left. I do have the N-Tracks program on a smaller hardrive, hmmm, could it be a temporary working file limit I’m hitting my head on. It’s just so odd to have it only open to 59 min 59 secs on any large WMA file that I’ve opened.
Drop a bug report to Flavio -
in the meantime, i presumr your recorder has some means for you to monitor its recordings (headphone socket etc) if so connect recorder out to soundcard in, start N recording and then press play on recorder, OK it will take 2 hrs to get file into N, you can see if the same thing happens doing it that way -
in PREFS make sure N is sending both mixed downed tracks and temp tracks to same folder and that folder is on large hard drive -
Dr J
Thx Doc,
Working/save directory is on the large drive.
Yup, the reason I got N was to convert WMA to wave and work with it in un-real time, lol. Seeing as this ability is new as of 1 or 2 “builds” ago and no else has any suggestions I’ll bug Flavio, although I’m a bit intimidated to talk to the creator. Does he like people to kneel, and grovel??? 
I hope it’s OK to link this but it is just so way cool, and what I’ve found to be tops in voice/music recorder and a USB2 flash drive, although us old people might find it a bit to small.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16873100525
Cheers
thats a neat recorder, the latest one overhere is the baby Boss -
verily thou must explain in a language of simplicity when confering with the creator - although he is a very clever person and speaks excelent English some things have a different meaning in N land than they do to us mortals -
Dr J
The maximum WAV file size is 4GB, due to the length fields in the RIFF headers.
thx Learjeff,
The WMA file I opened is 1:22:00 long and is 39,911 kb big.
The “stereo track” properties, when right clicking on file in main window, says the file converted from WMA is 620,168 kb
thx guys
The duration of the WMA file is relevant, but it’s size in bytes is not.
We also need to know your sample rate and wave format you’re using, e.g., 24 bits @ 44.1 kHz.
However, at your file duration, you’d only hit the 4GB limit with a 24 bit, 192kHz format (or 32 bit, 96kHz – but I doubt you’re converting to 32 bits).
It’s irrelevant whether it’s an NTFS file system, that was my main point.
Dr. J, you slipped a decimal point. For 16b/44k format, it’s about 640 MB/hr, not 6 GB/hr. For 24b/44k, it’s about a GB per hour.
I don’t know what’s up with n-Track. Try converting using dBPowerAmp Music Converter. Highly recommended for all audio format conversion needs.
thx learjeff,
The converted wave file in the main N-Track window shows the properties as being- 44,100 @ 16 bits, 2 channels, file size 620,128 kb.
Hmmmm, I’m starting to sound like a robot, lol.
I waiting on N-Track help desk to respond, I’ll post when I know sumptin.
thx for the link
Cheers
Hmmm, I’ve tried the forums and the FeedBack option, still waiting on a reply, even a reply as to how stupid a question I asked would be of some comfort… 
Any other suggestions as to how to get a response, short of groveling, although I would consider it, would be greatly appreciated.
Sound more an more like there is an arbitrary hour limit on the decoding process. That may or may not be something in the hands of n-Tracks, depending on how it’s been implemented, but it probably is.
The limit could be somewhere else, such as the size of a temp file, or something is simple as “we’ve been decoding to disk for an hour – let’s stop since this may be an error and we don’t want to fill up the hard drive”.
I’ve got quite a few files that are over an hour. That’s not unusual at all.
I think it’s a good thing to limit this in case of errors, but I think there should be an override or a place in the preferences to set the max…at least temporarily…if that would be possible.
WMA can stream forever, so a “error” could be decoding from a stream instead of a finite source like a file.
i seem to remember that this occured some time ago on another recording platform, the problem lay in the way SMPTE was setup - what happend was there is another timestamp attached to the SMPTE which most DAWS do not have access to - for some unknown reason the timestamp atsrts at 11pm and cannot cross the new day boundary, the answer was to find a way of accessing the SMPTE timestamp and resetting it to one in the morning giving 23 hours of recording time -
Dr J
As I said earlier, try using dBPowerAmp Music Converter. It’s free, handy, and converts between most known audio formats.
For WMA support, be sure to visit that site’s “codec central” and pick up the codecs for WMA.