I need to record 24 hour long mono soundfiles for an installation I'll be premiering in a few weeks. Right now, Max/MSP is crashing when I tell sfrecord~ to record longer than 13 hours. I know this has to do with the header limitations on AIFF/WAV files resulting in their 4GB limit. HFS+ should not be an issue and I'm using Max 5 in Snow Leopard. I've searched the forums and docs, and I see support in sfplay~ for different header configurations, but nothing in sfrecord~ docs about configuring headers for raw recordings or addressing the file size issue.

Are there any formats supported by sfrecord~ that will solve this problem and give me >4GB soundfiles? (or is there a way to tweak sfrecord~ params to get this result?). At worst, I can record in 12 hr chunks, but that isn't an ideal solution. I've included a test patch to show the crash. Many thanks!

I need to record 24 hour long mono soundfiles for an installation I'll be premiering in a few weeks. Right now, Max/MSP is crashing when I tell sfrecord~ to record longer than  13 hours. I know this has to do with the header limitations on AIFF/WAV files resulting in their 4GB limit. HFS+ should not be an issue and I'm using Max 5 in Snow Leopard. I've searched the forums and docs, and I see support in sfplay~ for different header configurations, but nothing in sfrecord~ docs about configuring headers for raw recordings or addressing the file size issue. 

sfrecord-crashing-maxmsp

I could be wrong, but I think SDII files are the only files on OS X that you can record longer than 4GB.

I tried with the available formats that are listed in the docs, so AIFF, WAV, .AU (which is SND, right?), and raw/.data and all crash Max. SDII is listed as an option in the old max 4.6 docs, but not the Max 5 ones. I tried opening a test.sd2 file and recording with a 14hr length and it still crashed. Part of the frustration is that Max actually completely crashes rather than giving an appropriate error message and just not running the patch.

An addendum to my earlier post - Anyone know of any 3rd party externals that record to disk and support the 

 specification to allow >4GB files? Thanks!

An addendum to my earlier post - Anyone know of any 3rd party externals that record to disk and support the RF64 specification to allow >4GB files? Thanks!

pmt4u wrote on Mon, 05 October 2009 23:24

 SDII is listed as an option in the old max 4.6 docs, but not the Max 5 ones. I tried opening a test.sd2 file and recording with a 14hr length and it still crashed.

Hmm, I hadn't noticed that I guess. Do you know if it worked recording an sd2 under the 4GB limit?

pmt4u wrote on Mon, 05 October 2009 23:24 SDII is listed as an option in the old max 4.6 docs, but not the Max 5 ones. I tried opening a test.sd2 file and recording with a 14hr length and it still crashed.

Hmm, I hadn't noticed that I guess.  Do you know if it worked recording an sd2 under the 4GB limit?


Yep, records fine with a 12 or 13 hr (i.e., 4GB it crashes as with the other files types. I played the sd2 file back in Peak and it is a valid sd2 file, so it is supported. The funny thing is that you can open a file with any weird extension and it still crashes at larger than 4GB. I tried recording to test.foo and the same thing happened (guessing it defaults to using an AIFF header or something if it doesn't recognize the extension).

sfrecord~ crashing Max/MSP