My impression is that the actual .wav file size limit is 4GB if we talk about the old-type standard .wav. There is a counter inside the file saying how large it is, and that can hold a maximum of 4Gb.
But the .wav file extension is used in a lot of different ways with a lot of different file formats. Most of these are sort of unusual, maybe only used be one specific program that is long since discontinued, so let us forget those specials. Lately there has been version going past the 4GB limit, but you have to very certain that your program can handle those.
Next thing was that, even if the limit is and always was 4GB, it is only rather recently that hard-disks where that large. (My first hard-disk was 10Mb). Easily then, sloppy programmers stumbled into a common programming pitfall, and then the limit ended up at 2GB for the program. Many programs, including wavelab, simply behaved odd with files larger than 2Gb. Since then the safe limit is 2Gb, and only if your program specifically supports it would I ever make files larger than 2GB. The limit though, still is 4.
In a taperssection usage I would split the files at max 2GB to be safe in the recorder and for future handling. The files could later be imported into an audio editor program and only inside the program be joined - letting the program worry about what to do about the limit. I would then export each song as a separate file, generally these are much smaller than the full show. Other programs could then safely read these smaller files without problems.
A decent program at a decent price for doing this on a PC is called Magix Studio. It does handle large files internally, allows you to cut out uninteresting pauses, normalize, eq, compress, limit and export. It also burns CD-s from inside the program.
http://site.magix.net/english-us/home/music/music-studio-11-deluxe/mustu-11/functions/?no_cache=1&version=standardAnyway, my 2 cents worth.
Gunnar
Topic: 2 GB .wav file limit. (Read 8597 times)