I recently ran into the same problem trying to open an .aiff with Soundforge 8a and Acid 4f. The file I was trying to open in Soundforge was a rendered on a mac and when I tried to open it, I got an error saying "The file is most likely corrupted or of an unknown format". I didn't pursue it in Soundforge since it was a friend's studio and I don't own Soundforge, so when I got home, I tried to open it in Acid 4 and I got the same error. The file plays fine in Quicktime, so I just exported it from there as a wave. Not that large of a file IMO (77 Megs) and it was only audio.

I'm pretty sure that AIFFs suffer from the same limitation as WAVs - because they use a signed 32-bit value for the chunk size they are limited to a maximum size of 2GB.

Do you have to use an AIFF? If so, could you split it into two halves, which would both be smaller than 2GB so should work OK? If you don't have to use an AIFF you could use the W64 format for files larger than 2GB - it is basically the same format as WAV but uses 64-bit values for the chunk sizes which means it can allow files vastly larger than 2GB.

Mark

The file itself can contain 4GB because the file size following the IFF format specifier (FORM) is an unsigned 32-bit integer. The data (SSND) chunk size, however, is defined as a 32-bit signed integer. So the file can contain 4GB, but the data chunk can only (technically) hold 2GB.

Unfortunately, very large AIF files (>= 2GB total) rendered from our applications are not properly handled by the reader. Also, the renderer should not permit you to create files that have a data chunk larger than 2GB. These problems have been logged into our bug database.

merlyn: The AIF plug-in can only read uncompressed (AIFF) files. It does not read compressed (AIFC) files. This may have been the reason you couldn't read the file that was created on a Mac, since it wasn't all that large.

Thanks for the info on that. It's appreciated.