Audacity does not handle saving long recordings properly

I am on v2.1.3 in W10.

I recorded almost 11 hours. The resultant file is 13.5GB long, which matches 11 hours of stereo data in float 32-bits WAV format.

When I read back the file into Audacity (or Audition, for that matter, or Groove Music), I only see 48 minutes or so of data. Same thing in VLC media player. This is because the wav format has a 4GB limitation.

Audacity should at the very least issue a warning and suggest another file format to save the recording in. That, or save as W64 or RF64. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV#RIFF_WAVE)

This was discussed recently on the developer’s mailing list. I think it’s agreed that “silently failing” is not helpful.
It does not appear to be currently logged on the Audacity bug tracker, so I’ll add it.
Thanks for the feedback.

I’ve logged the issue on the bug tracker.

I don’t know if this works on Windows, but I’ve just tested and it works on Linux.
The audio may be recovered from WAV files > 4GB using “Import Raw Data” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/file_menu_import.html#raw_data). This will add a little garbage at the start of the file (the file headers), which may be trimmed off after importing. You will probably need to manually set the “Encoding” for Import Raw.

Thanks for the feedback. Reading it all in in RAW format worked fine.

Oh good :smiley:
Thanks for confirming.