[Help] 4GB WAV file limit?

[NeonBible]

Converting a 5.1 AC3 track to WAV is giving me errors in both ffmpeg and eac3to due to reaching its file limit.

The result still seems to play correctly, but looks like the headers are screwed and media players can't determine its correct length.

What is the correct way to convert multi-channel audio to WAV? Or is it possible to fix the headers?

Apologies if this has been asked before but I couldn't find anything with search.

You need to use WAVE64 format. eac3to can handle it if I remember correctly, the file extension would be .w64

[TomArrow]

^ What he said.

There's also the RF64 standard as an alternative which I believe keeps the .wav file ending but I'm not sure if I ever saw a program that creates/handles that reliably or at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF64

Fun fact, you can make MPC-HC accept wave64 files by giving them the .wav file extension, heh.

[pipefan413]

Both right, aye. It gets more complicated if you want to keep everything 32-bit float, as I found recently myself, but if you're doing what I think you're doing, you can just convert to either .w64 or .rf64 initially, do what you want to do, then export as mono .wav and dither & encode those. Just make sure you keep track of which channel is which so you don't end up with LFE in your right surround channel or whatever. I can probably give you a hand if you need it; I can't do a whole lot of actual editing myself just now because my system's tied up with massive data transfer stuff that I don't want to slow down by reading and writing from drives while it's happening, but I can at least talk, hahah. I'm inclined to suggest WAVE64 over RF64 after experimenting with both but I suppose it depends what exactly you're doing and in which software.

[NeonBible]

Thank you all! W64 has sorted it.

Fun fact, you can make MPC-HC accept wave64 files by giving them the .wav file extension, heh.

Seems to play the .w64 file directly on my MPC-HC. But noticed it creates an extra audio track.

I'm inclined to suggest WAVE64 over RF64 after experimenting with both but I suppose it depends what exactly you're doing and in which software.

DVD 5.1 AC3 -> 5.1 WAV for syncing with avisynth/virtualdub2.

[pipefan413]

DVD 5.1 AC3 -> 5.1 WAV for syncing with avisynth/virtualdub2.

Yeah, then either import .w64 for the whole 5.1 or split into separate channels at decode stage (eac3to source.ac3 decoded.wavs) which will hopefully be less than 4 GB individually and import those into your script. You can export them separately again at the end if you like thus avoiding any need for a format that works around the 4 GB limit. Doesn't really make a huge difference imo; you can combine separate channels at top of script or import joined then split them before export, whatever.

Last time I did this I just imported .w64 up top, converted to float, resynced, exported each individual channel as a float and selectively (auto-blanking) dithered them and exported to 24-bit .wav files with RX batch processing window, which I then encoded to DTS-HD MA.