max. filesize?

[headphonica]

hello everybody,
help please!
i'm using audacity 1.3 (beta) under win vista and would like to export a file which is 8 Gb big.
for explanation: the plan is to create a 14+hours file in *.flac for this release
http://www.headphonica.com/?p=816
i already sticked the wave-files together which was no problem at all, but there's no way to export it, is there?
obviously it is impossible to save that as wave:
http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1329
if i try to export a flac the file is broken somehow.
what can i do?
what am i doing wrong?

thanks in advance for any suggestions

[steve]

Export it in sections and use a playlist. Many media players support playlists, so the user will just tell the media player to play the playlist and it will play each file as a continuous "track" according to the playlist. With this method the total size can be as big as you like.

[headphonica]

thanks a lot but,
no no no, it shall be 14+ hours in one piece, as flac.
is that possible somehow?

[steve]

no no no

Why why why?

[headphonica]

ehm... it shall be one piece.
in flac.

it is already divided in 5 chunks / mp3, but it shall be one.

there's this lousy limitation with wav-files [4GB only], but it should be possible with flac somehow to make it one piece, shouldn't it?

and, ehm, why?
it's a piece of art.
so it doesn't matter "why"

[steve]

Art! that's a good enough reason for me

As far as I know Flac should be able to do over 8GB - or to be more precise, the FLAC format can support large files. The problem is that the Windows build of FLAC has a 2GB limit (or at least it did a couple of years ago and I've not heard that there's been any change). The reason being that support for large files on Windows requires that flac.exe is built with windows-specific APIs, which it isn't.

The most likely solution that I can think of is to try doing it on an operating system that isn't Windows. (Mac or Linux).

(For arts sake, and for sound quality, I hope that you're making the FLAC version from the original WAV files and not from the inferior MP3s).

[headphonica]

oh thanks a lot, i'm gonna switch to linux then [#! crunchbang linux]...

[hm... still have to install it on this damn vista-machine...]

and yes, it's the originals in wave [between 1.5 and 1.7 GB sized], of course... anything else would be non-sense somehow, funny non-sene maybe - but non-sense.

thanks, steve!

[steve]

Dual Boot?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

[headphonica]

hm, yes - looks like...
i've always been afraid of this dual-boots, but there's no other option now [would take me 3 or 4 days to export such a file on my other linux-machine]...

it's all for the arts!

[headphonica]

one more question, steve,

the Windows build of FLAC has a 2GB limit (or at least it did a couple of years ago and I've not heard that there's been any change). The reason being that support for large files on Windows requires that flac.exe is built with windows-specific APIs, which it isn't.

does that mean that windows can't play FLAC-files that are larger than 2GB?
i mean can any audio-player handle it at all / would this file be exclusively made for the "penguins-party"?
or is it only that the windows version of audacity can't export FLAC-files larger than 2GB?

btw. my attempt to export the piece as FLAC resulted in a file exactly 2GB big, but it was totally broken and couldn't be opened by any program - even the progress-bar in audacity started to flicker wildly...