Ableton Forum

I set up live to record an 8-hour live show today, from a simple 2-channel feed running off a desk into a single audio track on Live. Simple, you might think. Click and leave it, yes?

Everything was working fine at the beginning, but I left it and came back a couple of hours later to find Live still recording but the track disarmed (so it wasn't recording anything).

I cursed a great deal (it was my band that was missed!), assumed some idiot had been fiddling, and re-armed the track. It continued recording. I came back a couple of hours later to find the same thing had happened, and we'd lost the headliner's set too.

I checked the length of the two recorded clips and they were both, IIRC, 4500.1.2 exactly - just over 120 mins.

So, it's clear that Live stops recording clips when they reach a fixed length.

Has anyone else hit this? Seems a bit of a tragic bug - it really let me down today and I'm going to have to use another product for live recordings in future unless it's fixed...!

Cheers

there are quite possibly some OS file size issues happening, it might not be Live

Limitations

The WAV format is limited to files that are less than 4 GiB in size, due to its use of a 32 bit unsigned integer to record the file size header (some programs limit the file size to 2 GiB). Although this is equivalent to about 6.6 hours of CD-quality audio (44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo), it is sometimes necessary to go over this limit.

maybe you were using a higher bit rate or sample rate??

I thought it was 2GB by default in XP?

Under Windows XP and Windows 2000, NTFS supports a maximum file size of up to the disk size, while FAT32 supports a maximum file size of only 4 GB.

(from looking around the web, it appears XP/ NTFS can handle potentially 2TB (!!) partitions)

but the .wav limitation may be coming into play

6.6 hours at 16 bit? You'd've thought I'd get more than 2 hours at 24 bit/44.1khz, which was what I was using...

Interesting though...

well, possibly live is limiting the .wav file to 2G,

if that were 3.3@ 16/44.1,

then i could see it being 2.2 @ 24 bit (????)

close

anyway, in the same wikipedia article, there is mention of another file format, .w64 i think, which is used in sound forge. so maybe try that

or for example, when i used to use sonar, it had a feature where you could record onto new tracks each time it looped, so you could set like a 1 3/4 hour loop length and let it go, then edit together the tracks when it was done.

just another idea

Great idea. Now Live just need to come up with a feature that does this in the background, and strings them together seamlessly on playback.