[ecasound] filesize limitations

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Subject: [ecasound] filesize limitations
From: Kai Vehmanen (k_AT_eca.cx)
Date: Wed Oct 10 2001 - 00:21:11 EEST

A few people have asked me about filesize limitations in ecasound and
ecawave. At the moment the two closest ones are:

1. Ecasound and ecawave use long ints for storing position_in_samples
and length_in_samples. On many 32bit platforms long int is 32bit. This
means that with 44100Hz sample rate, ecasound and ecawave can handle upto
13 hours (--> 8GB files). (*)

2. As far as I know, ext2 still has the 2GB upper limit for
filesizes. With cd-quality this means 3 hours of audio. (**)

3. ftell(), fseek() and other standard file access routines in glibc also
use long ints (--> 2GB limit for filesizes with 32bit platforms). There
are 64bit variants of these functions, but support must be explicitly
added to ecasound before this helps. (**)

So for very long recordings, it's better to encode directly to ogg or mp3,
or split material into multiple files. Of course, upgrading to a 64bit
platform or possibly a different filesystem also helps.

(*) Affects all files types.
(**) Doesn't necessarily affect externally handled file types like
     aif&snd (libaudiofile), ogg, mp3, mikmod-modules, etc. 

-- 
 http://www.eca.cx
 Audio software for Linux!

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