strange and terrible WAV file corruption problem?

[rstreber]

I posted this problem over at PRW, but I'm hoping that maybe someone here might have a suggestion that I haven't yet tried.

I had a session a few days ago where we were recording relatively long-form improvisations with a jazz quartet. Mostly 20-30 minute takes, and I was running PT HD 12.8 at 96/24, 20 inputs recording simultaneously the whole time. The session went totally smoothly, we listened to playback, I exported ref mixes and burned them to CDs for the clients, and everyone was happy.

As I was about to shut down and backup, I noticed that some regions in a particular take looked weird and Pro Tools was hanging (said it was fetching overviews, and a number of regions displayed as blank or as if there were blocks of full-scale noise.)

I restarted PT and reopened the session to find that ALL of the regions in that one particular take (a 27-minute-long multi-part improv) were now screwed up. All of them looked normal for the first 3 minutes or so and the all have brief burst(s) of white noise / static followed by either complete silence or (in the case of a couple of the regions) continued FS noise for the remainder of the region's duration.

I immediately got on the phone w Avid support and spent an hour with them during which time we tried all of the usual fixes - trashed prefs, reinstalled PT with update to 12.8.1, tried importing the WAV files into a new session, etc. Nothing helped, and the Avid support guy got off the phone saying that it was an issue of corrupt WAV files and not really PT's (or his) problem.

After that, i've tried opening the individual WAV files in question with VLC player, importing these WAV files into Audacity as Raw Data and experimenting with different types of import sessings there, have tried importing them into a new PT session at a different sample rate, and none of these steps have yielded any improvements. In every case, the files are ok for about three minutes and then go to silence after a brief burst of noise.

Have any of you ever experienced anything like this? Is there anything I'm missing or might try? It just seems so insane that the files were there and playing back properly, then suddenly they weren't. Like they self destructed after living on the hard drive for about an hour.

In case it's at all helpful, I'm running an HDX system on Sierra, the computer is a 2013 12-core Mac Pro tower w 16 GB RAM, and my front end is a 24X32 Burl Mothership on the 1st port and a couple of Apogee 16X-series units for additional I/O on the 2nd port (clocked via WC to the Burl.)

[Top Jimmy]

This sounds like a drive issue. Do you have Diskwarrior? I'd run Diskwarrior on the drive and rebuild the directory. Can't guarantee that'll solve your problem but disk related issues I've had in the past were always fixed by Diskwarrior.


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[Top Jimmy]

Just in case your drive is going south, I'd be sure to copy everything off the drive first.


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[rstreber]

Thanks - yes, am going to get everything off that drive, was just trying to use it lightly while working on the problem. I'll run Disk Warrior in the morning and see how that goes.

[rstreber]

Disk Warrior did nothing, showed the drive as basically being healthy. I rebuilt the directory anyway, no change to the files in question.

[Rich Breen]

It may be too late for any of this, but if it were me I'd *immediately* get those files off of the current drive and off of that system. Then I'd try opening them on another known-good rig and see if they behave or if they're hosed.

When you say: "In every case, the files are ok for about three minutes and then go to silence after a brief burst of noise", is the corruption happening every time at exactly the same spot in the file, or is it behaving differently on different trials?

[albee1952]

This is a "Hail Mary", but if nothing else helps......Create a new blank session at 48K, import all the tracks and do sample rate conversion. In the past, I have saved corrupt sessions by using SRC on the audio. Honestly have no idea if it will help, but.....

[rstreber]

Thanks. I already tried moving the files to another drive, importing them into a new 48k session, etc. Nothing has helped.

And the files are consistently screwed up in that all of them always have a noise burst at exactly the same point in the file, then are silent from then on. It doesn't change depending on when or where I open it. It's like the files are healthy and that's just how they are. The drive itself seems fine, at least accrding to Disk Warrior; and like I said moving the files to another drive doesn't make any difference, nor does reading them in various ways from another drive.

[rstreber]

In case it's of interest, here are a couple of screen shots of one of the files in question opened in iZ Rx. One is a view of the whole file, the other is a detail showing the point where the noise happens, followed by silence. All of the files for this particular take basically look (and sound) like this.

[StillHollow]

It may have just been one of those things due to unforeseen circumstances (power sag, lightning, etc.) that may never happen again. In any case I suspect your session is hosed so hopefully your clients are understanding and that wasn't the "magical" take of the session.