sfrecord~/sfinfo~ problem w/multichannel wav files

Thank you both for your help.

Patrick: I read that thread (and several others that were related) before posting. That thread is two years old (some of the other threads are older). The last post is a year ago. I thought perhaps there was some newer information. Has Max really not been able to write the industry-standard wav file format for this long?

Helmuth: No, that's not the problem. The sig~ and snapshot~ are unnecessary (leftovers from stitching together bits and pieces to create this demo patch) they cancel each other out. If you remove them both same results. As I mention in my second post the actual duration reported by sfinfo~ in ms is "inf". This wouldn't account for all of the other missing information anyway.

Here's what I've found:
1) In step 3, when I open the output file with the savedialog object the savedialog requires an uppercase WAVE to force it to output a wav filename. It reports the filename with path out outlet 1 and the filetype out outlet 2. The reported filetype is again uppercase WAVE. I pack the two together and prepend "open" to get: 'open "path/filename" WAVE' and feed that into the sfrecord~ object --- but --- sfrecord requires the filetype argument to be lowercase "wave". My patch was writing AIFF files with a .wav extension. If sfrecord~ doesn't understand the filetype argument it goes to its default filetype. I discovered this by examining the file header.
2) The solution to get it to write wav files was to case convert "WAVE" to "wave".
3) Now it writes wav files that sfinfo~ can understand.
4) Unfortunately ---> they are wav files that nothing else will read.

(Edit: one last note, 1 or 2 channels good, 3 or more channels bad.)

If I think back over all of the things cycling74 has done over the last several years (Max 5 and 6, Max4Live, gen, 64 bit...) it's astounding that something this fundamental (being able to write industry standard audio files) has gone unfixed.

Am I missing something?