Hello there,
What is the maximum recording time at 8 audio channels (microfoons) at the same time? Does anyone know?
Welcome!
This depends on the size of your hard drive. In the top right hand corner of Ardour you’ll see “Rec:” Mine says >24 hours and it is a 250GB SSD. This might be useful: https://www.sounddevices.com/audio-recording-calculator/
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Thanks a lot mr. or mrs. Bach. I’ts most certainly useful. Thanks
By default Ardour records to 32bit float (which isn’t an option in that calculator).
But it’s straight forward to calculate it:
Channels * (samples/second) * (bytes/sample/channel) * seconds
e.g. recording 8 stereo tracks (= 16 channels), 32bit (= 4byte) at 44.1kHz for 5 mins (=300 sec) needs:
16 * 44100 * 4 * 300 = 846 MB = 807 MiB
Thanks for your input guys but I’am afraid that it is not a matter of disc space. For example, Ableton goes till 2 GB en than its over and out.
The Zoom R24 recorder/interface also has a very limited record time. Excuses for my poor englisch but I am only a simple duchman.
If you use .wav files there is indeed a 4GB limit per file (2^32 samples). Some systems play it safe and further limit this to 2^31.
Ardour does not have this limitation, you can use .w64 (Session > Properties > Media). Also Ardour from ardour.org automatically upgrades .wav -> w64 when the limit is reached (not all distro builds do this). This happens after 6 hours 12 mins of continuous recording (at 48kHz, 32bit).
Another limit is that some VFAT-32 file systems (common on older windows systems) cannot handle files 4GB. It’s not usually advised to keep Ardour sessions on those file systems since they also are case-insensitive and cause issues.
Still, keep in mind that is is per file (not per session). So unless you for record 6 hours continuously without stopping, this is of no concern.
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