power failure: corrupt wav files - help?

jbolley wrote on 2/6/2007, 9:06 AM

Through no fault of my own, while recording audio for documentary video a crew member unplugged my system. I have reconstructed the project but I still have 4 of 8 audio files that are corrupted. They are large wav files (so there's data there) but I've had trouble opening them.
Does anyone have experience with this in Vegas (I do have other tools like CEP & SF)? What is the structure of the files and how can I best load them now that (I assume) the header is screwed up.

Thanks much,

Jesse

Comments

rraud wrote on 2/6/2007, 9:52 AM

Change the extention to .raw and try opening in SF. This works for files that exceed the 2GB limit for wave files.

jbolley wrote on 2/6/2007, 11:11 AM

I'll give it a shot. The files in question are (only) 1.6GB so the file size isn't the issue.
I tried opening as raw in CEP with only marginal success. There are choices for bit packing format Intel vs. Motorola. Any ideas what the native format looks like header wise?
Thanks,
Jesse

ultrafinriz wrote on 2/6/2007, 8:50 PM

Changing the ext to raw and opening in SF 6 I get audio but it's nasty. Using 'big endian' I get noisy distorted audio, using 'little endian' I get full scale digital white noise.
I would love any help.

Jesse

MarkWWWW wrote on 2/7/2007, 5:43 AM

When opening a file as RAW you need to supply the information on things like sample rate, bit depth, etc, yourself. If you supply incorrect information your results will vary from white noise to distorted but recognisable audio.

If these were files you were recording yourself you presumably know what these details should be, so make sure you have entered them correctly - it will probably be either 16-bit PCM or 24-bit PCM. Definitely choose Signed and Little Endian. Select Mono or Stereo appropriately. You may also need to discover the length of header to skip to avoid the splat at the beginning caused by interpreting the header information as audio data. A typical value might be 44, but if you have a hex editor you can determine it for yourself - look at the start of the file and you will see the word "data" near the beginning, the next 4 bytes are the length of the audio chunk and the first byte of audio data is the fifth byte after the word "data".

Mark

ultrafinriz wrote on 2/8/2007, 6:33 AM

thanks mark,
I've done all the raw imports I can, I know the sample rate, channels, bit depth... Endian didn't impact the results.
I played with a couple hex editors last night. 010 was cool, it has a wav template. It threw up all sorts of fatal errors. I tried copying parts of a good file into a bad one. Maybe a wiz could make something out of it but I'll just move on.
I believe vegas was recording when the a/c plug was pulled out of the wall. I should be happy that half of those tracks that were rolling were recoverable.

Jesse