288 Layers

I am trying to layer 288 5 minute audio tracks in order for them to
all play at the same time. in pro tools it doesnt let me layer that
many files or i havent found a way to do it yet. any ideas? any
software that i could use?

(you might be wondering why i want to play 288 5minute tracks at the
same time?? 288 x 5 min = 24 hours. i.e. 24 hours of sound in 5
minutes...)

regards,
sascha

It's not an Audition limitation that wouldn't let you do this, but the chances of your PC being able to play that many tracks at once is... well I don't rate your chances at all, quite frankly, whatever software you try.

So, the way you do it is to process the files in batches. 12 tracks at once, mixed down to one track. Then get these 12 mixed tracks, and do the same thing again. That will give you one 5 minute mixdown of 144 tracks. Do the whole exercise again, and then mix together the two resultant tracks, and you've done it without running out of resources.

And if you end up with anything other than noise, I'll be amazed. You've got 288 times anything that was happening, which will be beyond cacophony, and even if there are points where nothing happens, the background noise floor will be raised by about 25dB anyway! (and if you really want to know the precise answer, it's actually 24.59dB, and easy to calculate...)

I'm pretty sure the resulting audio, even if the signal is normalized, would still be pure noise.

would that be 'pure' white, pink, brown; Gaussian, Poisson, Cauchy?

& wouldn't such a file present a source for an interesting corollary study for restoring information to data compressed audio?

(see: Huber, Zhang, Liu, et al (at least in Neuroreport))