Maximum recording time?

How to use MultiTrack DAW
mitch
Posts: 3
Joined: January 26th, 6:35 am

Maximum recording time?

Post by mitch »

I've been recording songs on Multitrack DAW using 24 bit 44.1 kHz format. But now I'd like to record a whole live jam session of at least an hour's duration. Can I do this with your product? Is there a maximum duration for the recordings you can make with it?

And how much storage space would a one hour recording use up on my iPad? That's another consideration because of my limited available storage space on my iPad.

Would appreciate some guidelines or even some rules of thumb on these matters, thanks!

-mitch
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pwnified
Posts: 1565
Joined: August 17th, 9:41 pm

Re: Maximum recording time?

Post by pwnified »

Lets try and calculate this here so it makes sense to me again. I like to do this occasionally because I always forget.

24 bit audio is 3 bytes. In stereo, that would be 6 bytes per 'frame'.
There are 44100 frames in one second of audio. So far we got 6 * 44100 = 264,600
So 1 minute would be (60 * 264,600) = 15,876,000
Or close to 16 Megs per minute for stereo 24 bit raw wav audio.
One hour will cost you 952,560,000 or basically 1 gig per hour.

There is a 4 gig limit to wav files, so you should be able to record 4 hours in a single 'region'. If you keep recording, another region will be created immediately after and recording will continue. However, multitrack does have a 5 hour limit, so it will stop at the 5 hour limit.

Also, if you want to mixdown the song, you're going to need twice that much space if the mixdown is to wav, and even more if the mixdown is to m4a or ogg format because those formats need more space for the compression phase.

If you record that long and are basically using multitrack as a field recorder, I recommend forgoing the mixdown and using iTunes File Sharing to drag the song folder out onto the desktop of your computer and then digging around in the Bins folder to find the raw wav file. It's not ideal for this purpose but super huge files are still rather unwieldy to work with on iOS.
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