Thank you for that excellent Grammy reference (dated
May 27th, 2003).
The precise wording can be found at the bottom of page 6:
http://www.grammy.com/PDFs/Recording_Academy/
Producers_And_Engineers/Deliver
yRecs.pdf
and reads:
"2 It is unclear at this time whether the specification of
the Broadcast Wave File format can be amended to explicitly
include multi-channel (for numbers of channels > 2) files
in time for release of this document. Also, BWF files with
more channels are more likely to exceed the FAT32 maximum
file size of 2gbytes. When the BWF Standard is so amended
it is understood that this document will be updated to
include multichannel content in BWF files."
Although this document is over 4 years old and was written
when MBWF (RF64) was still in the specification stage, now
that MBWF is well defined and even supported by a few vendors
(most notably Steinberg with Nuendo, Cubase and Wavelab), I
still have to agree with John and the folks at the Grammy
Foundation that it is still too soon to support MBWF as an
archival format. My own recent experiments bear out what
others have noted in this thread: MBWF support and
compatibility are still poor among vendors.
Practically speaking, MBWF is a great intermediate solution
for production work with large files, but it's not supported
widely enough to be used as an archival format.