DC6 Extended Recording did not work

[ClassicalCanine]

Wagner is not known for brevity! I was recording an historic radio broadcast today which was 3.5 hours in length. I hit the 2GB limit around 2:06:26 at which point recording just stopped. The manual states:

"Extended Recording
Record material of any length- No 2 Gig Wave file Limit
Wave files are limited in length to 2 Gbytes. In some situations, it is desirable to record for a period of that exceeds this 2 Gbyte limit. The Extended Recording Feature accommodates this situation. It works by automatically opening a new file when a particular file approaches the 2 Gbyte limit. When you save the Extended file(s), you will see that the file(s) will be named in the following format:
xxx_part1
xxx_part2
xxx_part3
xxx_partn
Each file will have to be played or processed independently thereafter."

Does anyone else have experience using Extended Recording? Did I do something wrong?

Just for background, I was using the DC6 record function, 44.1kHz, 24-bit, and the sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum. Windows XP Home SP2. This is my first problem ever with DC6. A search of FAQ for "extended" yielded nothing.

- Brian.

[Rick Barber]

I have run into a limit but it was disk space the killed me. The disk where my temp files are kept filled up and killed the recording. I cleaned out some space and have not had a problem since.

[Craig Maier]

The only thing that is a bit unusual is the 24 bit part. I only remember using extended recording with 16 bit and a 44.1 KHz sampling rate. That is not to say that the 24 bit depth was the problem, just an observation that I made which is different from what I have done. Certainly, recording a historic broadcast with 16 bit resolution should be adequate. 24 bit would be overkill in that situation since no historic broadcasts will have 144 dB of dynamic range.

[Dan McDonald]

I haven't had a problem with extended recording of 24-bit files, although I haven't gone much over 4 gigs.

Dan

[Craig Maier]

Is it possible that the hard drive just filled up?

[ClassicalCanine]

Lots of disk space, reason for 24-bit

I checked the directory I use for the temporary files, its in a place where there is currently about 16GB available.

I use 24-bit because the input is just a little low even at maximum levels, so I normalize to -1.00db (recording is around -5 db) then reduce to 16-bit. This keeps the full resolution. Following that I need to squish to 192kbps mp3, using an encoder in a different product that is kind of slow but does a good job.

The other three operas are divided into Acts. The first one is just one Act that lasts over three hours. So, until I resolve this, I shall stop at the end of each act and start a new recording.

I'll do some tests when this project is all over to see if I can either get it to work or find out for sure that it doesn't.

Thanks to all for the advice, greatly appreciated!

- Brian.

[Dan McDonald]

by any chance did you use the timer and were recording late at night?

I seem to recall a problem with the timer if the material went past midnight on an early version of the software, so make certain that you're fully updated.

And there may have been a problem with the timer and 24-bit files early on also. That one is more vague to me, but I seem to recall something about some difficulty I had when I first tried out the timer with DC6.

Dan

[ClassicalCanine]

No timer, no midnight crossing

No, I started the recording manually at 6:30 P.M. local time and it would have reached the limit at about 8:37 P.M.

The file size is 1,960,275 KB = 2,007,321,600 bytes. (2GB = 2,147,483,648) The documentation says it switches a little before it hits the limit, which is sensible, in this case 140,162,048 bytes before it hit the hard maximum. Hmmm, 1 MB early would seem to be sufficient. Perhaps something else went wrong instead. In any event, there was no error message posted.

Thanks for everybody's ideas - I'll just have to try some experiments later, to try and nail this down. First thing is to just plain reproduce the problem using identical settings. I'm busy with other things so it may be a week before I can let everyone know the results of my tests.

-- Brian.