5GB wav file somehow interpreted as being ~13 minutes long?

[Asterra]

This one has me stumped, and I used to figure I knew my way around audio files.

I'm trying to merge (with minor edits such as fades) several bits and pieces of 5.1-channel audio clips into one whole. For starters, I simply couldn't get Nero's AC3 working to where eac3to could find it (no matter how I installed it, what DLLs I registered, what registry entries I added, or how many times I rebooted), so if anyone has a surefire guide for that, I'd love to see it. Libav's biggest shortcoming (with non-TrueHD AC3 decoding), evidently, is that it produces a result that starts out one second out of sync and fails to even maintain that discrepancy with time. Pretty frustrating. The AC3 plugin for Adobe Audition shares this problem.

Anyway. The audio tracks in question are the full audio from about a dozen movies. I actually only need anywhere from 1 to 12 minutes from each of them, but all I know how to do with eac3to is a straightforward conversion from DTS/DD to wav.

For the mixing, first thing I tried using was Adobe Audition with its multitrack editor. I immediately noticed a problem: When I pointed it to one of my ~5GB wav files (24 bit 48 Khz ~90 minutes), it gave up after about 12 minutes. I got the impression that it ran out of ram and arbitrarily truncated the wav to whatever it could manage up till then.

No big deal; I knew I would eventually have to turn to Premiere Pro anyway so I could sync everything up with the video, and PPro never seemed to have any real problem with gigantic files, since it has its astonishingly ravenous "media cache files" system. Well, unfortunately, PPro has the same problem. Give it a 5GB wav file generated by eac3to (3.24) and it only gets the first 12 minutes or so. Tried it with several different generated wavs. Audacity has the same problem also.

It must be something wrong with the wavs themselves. But what? There is no 12 minute 6-channel wav I know of that takes up 5GB. Why aren't these programs seeing the rest of the data?

A temporary solution (and one I'd make use of, just so I can wash my hands of this ordeal) would be if there's a command line I could use to specify in/out times for eac3to to convert. I'd definitely be happier if somebody can explain what's going on and how to circumvent this apparent bug. ;p

Thanks in advance!

[Joe H]

You have to use a 64 bit version of wave (like W64) if you want WAV files bigger than 4GB!

[Atak_Snajpera]

you should export from eac3to to .w64 instead of .wav. eac3to always warns if your .wav will be larger than 4gb.

[Asterra]

Guess I learn something new every day. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

Don't suppose anyone could point me to a decent guide for getting Nero's AC3 decoding to function correctly with eac3to? That's the only component I'm still missing in my current project. I already tried installing Nero7 lite, registering the DLLs themselves, adding various permutations of registry keys... The problem is that whenever people talk about what they did to get things working, they leave out too many details, and there is a lot of disagreement as to what steps should be necessary to undertake before eac3to finally sees things correctly.

[Asterra]

Audition (3) doesn't like Wave64, looks like.

There a way to tell eac3to to convert only specific parts (begin time, end time) of the input file?

[Bonie81]

It seems like 4GB limitation is because of your file system, not the software you are running.

here a way to tell eac3to to convert only specific parts (begin time, end time) of the input file?

I do not think that eac3to supports start and end points.
If you specify or provide more details on your source format and desired output format, some ffmpeg pro users can show you exact command lines. I guess, ffmpeg supports start and end points, encoding of specific part. Or simply just go through ffmpeg user manual.

Further more WAV Editor bundled with Nero supports editing and encoding to AC3 to the best of my knowledge (never used Nero).

[Ai Haibara]

It seems like 4GB limitation is because of your file system, not the software you are running.

How? If Asterra is indeed running XP, as the Computer Details seem to indicate, that would tend to imply he's using NTFS... not FAT32, where the ~4GB single-file limit would come into play.

[Asterra]

It seems like 4GB limitation is because of your file system, not the software you are running.

The problem was the unknown (to me) limitations of the WAV file format, as suggested earlier by others. Adobe Audition 3 is also incapable of handling Wave64 files. Fortunately, Audacity can do it.

The only remaining stumbling block is my lack of success in getting Nero 7's AC3 decoder to play nice with eac3to. Eac3to therefore defaults to libav, which unfortunately spits out a result which is no longer in sync with the original audio and also gets more out of sync with time. To say this complicates matters is an understatement.