anyway to recover corrupted wav files from power loss while recording in vegas?

jbrooks wrote on 4/22/2002, 2:24 PM

I was recording some audio files with vegas 2.0, when the battery on my laptop went dead.
vegas cant open em, soundforge cant open them, nor can other audio apps i've tried.

The files have the proper size (~700MB), but summary info reports them as having zero total time.

Is there any way to recover these. soundforge saves them as temp files for recovery upon next session, vegas 2.0 doesnt. If vegas 3.0 did I would upgrade ina heartbeat!

thanks,
jimbo

Comments

jbrazier wrote on 4/22/2002, 2:37 PM

The problem is wav files are structurally more difficult to handle than say an mpeg file. Mmegs are basically a series of images in succession, removing images in the middle or 'truncating' the file at the end doesn't create any adverse problems with playback, beyond the flow of course. The same thing applies with having half the data for a jpeg image, you'll see what you have data for -not what you do not. Wav files have header information at the start of the file and need a footer at the end of the file to 'cap' it correctly. I hate to say this, but I seriously doubt there's any way to recover what you've lost.

MarkWWWW wrote on 4/23/2002, 8:24 AM

You can probably recover these files using Sound Forge.

The problem is that since the power failed before the files were closed, Vegas never had time to write information concerning the length, etc, of the audio to the file, causing it to not to be a properly constructed WAV file.

But the audio data inthe file is probably recorded OK and with a bit of trickery you should be able to recover it. The trick is to open the file as RAW audio in Sound Forge - you'll have to tell it a few details like bit-depth, sample rate, whether it is a mono or a stereo file, etc, but it should then be able to open the file OK. You will find that there will be a nasty splat at the very start of the file - this is the header of the WAV file, but is being interpreted as audio data because you have told Sound Forge to treat the whole file as RAW data. The easiest way to deal with this is just to edit out the splat before you save the file as a new WAV file, but if you really wanted to you could work out how long the header is (look at it in a hex editor) and tell Sound Forge to skip over this bit at the start of the file when it opens it as RAW. But in practice it's easiest just to edit it out. Then just save the recovered audio to a new WAV file and move on to the next one.

Best of luck.

Mark

nlamartina wrote on 4/23/2002, 12:20 PM

Jimbo,

Vegas 3 has an autosave recovery function similar Sound Forge, although it wouldn't have saved you from this situation since the wave data hadn't been completely dropped on the disk. Being non-destructive and all, it protects the project, not data that's being captured on disk.

Hope this helps,
Nick LaMartina