Unable to Export Large File

[Maximus]

Hi Everyone,
I should start out by saying that I don't know as much about audacity or computers as some of the people on here so you will have to forgive me if this doesn't come out right.
A friend of mine has on cassette tape the entire unabridged Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books as audiobooks read by the author. These were unavailable to buy from anywhere I looked so I decided to record them onto my computer. I downloaded Audacity and connected my stereo to the line in port on my computer and recorded each tape and exported them in .wav format. There were 8 tapes per book and so 8 tracks per book. I then decided I wanted to join the tracks of each book into one long track, so there would be one track per book.
I'm using Audacity to do this by importing all of the tracks into audacity at the same time, highlighting the first track, finding the zero crossing and copying and pasting each subsequent track onto the first until all 8 tracks are one big track. The problem is when I try and export it. It exports to the folder I have specified but when I play it seems to have only exported a little over a quarter of the long track (equivalent to about 3 of the original tracks).
I have tried selecting the whole track and clicking "export selection as WAV" instead of just "Export as WAV" and the exact same thing occurs. The interesting thing though is that in another attempt I cut out a bit of silence (about ten seconds) at the beginning of the track and exported as before. When I played it it stopped in exactly the same place again, on the same word even though the next ten seconds after that word should have been on there because I had made the space. So to investigate this I selected everything from about 2 seconds before that word to the end of the track and exported it in .wav format. Once fully exported the computer told me it was 4GB in size but only played 2 seconds of track, the two seconds I had selected before the word at which it stopped before. So it seems that everything after that specific point in the track, audacity is unable to export, or at least, it does export it but media player won't play it, but they were all fine before I tried joining them.
Has anyone experienced this before? Is there an easier way of joining tracks in audacity that may help me bypass this issue?
I'm pretty much at loss of what might have caused this and would appreciate any help you can give me. I hope this post was clear enough.

Thanks

Max

[steve]

Yes there are problems with really big audio files - it's not an Audacity problem, it's a more general issue. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV#Limitations

I would recommend Exporting the audio in smaller chunks - say 1 GB (or 700 MB, then you can make audio CDs from each chunk). You can use "Export Selection" to do this.
Most media players support "Play Lists" which allow you to set a series of audio tracks to play in sequence one after the other - this is a much better option than creating one massive file.

[waxcylinder]

A friend of mine has on cassette tape the entire unabridged Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books as audiobooks read by the author. These were unavailable to buy from anywhere I looked so I decided to record them onto my computer.

this surprises me - I bought the whole set in a boxed edition on CDs just the Christmas before last from Amazon.co.uk.

I note though now that Amazon UK no longer has it - but Play.com has it in stock for £45 - see: http://www.play.com/Books/AudioBooks/4- ... oduct.html

Amazon.com in the US has it for $63 - http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=s ... &x=13&y=17

So save yourself a pile of work - buy the CDs, rip them into iTunes or whatever you use - and enjoy much better audio quality (and some good extras that come with the boxed set).

WC