Working with a 24 bit 48khz 5.1 DTS HD track that would exceed WAV GB limit

[HoraceMcMahon]

This is less a technical question and more a "what does one do" question.

I have a DTS HD 24 bit 5.1 track. I needed to get it into a format that can be edited by most non linear editing programs. Converting to 24 bit PCM wav yields a file too large (6GB, so above the 4GB wav limit). Converting to 24 bit FLAC works, but FLAC is not compatible with the NLE I'm using. My solution seems hacky, but it was the best I could think of. Using ffmpeg I put the 24 bit 48k pcm stream in a .mov with no video, just audio. It seems to work fine. I guess it works like the wav does, and provides the header and track info the lpcm stream needs to be decoded?

What do professionals do when they need to work with an archival quality 2 or 3 hour multitrack 24bit 48kHz (or higher!) audio track (an old film's audio track, say, during mastering to Blu-ray)? How is such a file stored? Wav can't store it. It would exceed 4GB. FLAC? I doubt it, for compatibility reasons. Also FLAC can't map 5.1 or 7.1 channels correctly, as far as I know. I believe you can store the audio in a raw lpcm file of any size, but what editor or player can decode that? There's no header or track information. Surely they aren't archiving these in formats like DTS HD or TrueHD, because those are delivery formats not really meant to be edited.

Confused, hoping a pro will enlighten me.

[El Heggunte]

Both W64 and RF64 are free from the 4GB filesize limitation.
The MXF container is another alternative.

But if your NLE doesn't support them either, well, ......

P.S.: FWIW, it's possible to create audio-only AVI files.
I use wavavimux for this task.

[pandy]

Raw pcm?

[Cornucopia]

All good answers. +CAF, wav segmenting... Would make it a heck of a lot easier if we just knew the NLE.

Scott

[HoraceMcMahon]

Thanks for the answers, all.

It's Premiere (so W64, RF64, CAF, as I understand, won't work), but I'm also curious what's "standard" in these cases, professionally. For archival purposes. Broadcast Wave and Sony Wave64 and Apple's CAF have uneven compatibility (versus the universal WAV) and so using them as gold standard archiving formats seems off, ditto audio only movs and avis.

Is there any benefit to audio only avi vs. audio only mov?

Will wav segmenting make muxing in programs like mkvtoolnix and others more difficult? Does segmenting mean files like .wav then .w01 and .w02 that would be read as one file? Or multiple discrete .wav files?