\'save a copy as\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

I have been using 'save a copy of' after recording large sessions across many drives to transfer multi-disk allocations to a single drive for my clients for years. I have never had any problems with this until recently.

During a 'save a copy as', one of fifty-six files was damaged on the ORIGINAL drive by the ProTools application. It still has a .WAV suffix, appears in both the finder and DigiBase showing its original size of some 456MB, but will not play. I have tried every option in Peak 5.21 to repair this file, no go. I have tried to open it into different formats in Sound Converter, Logic.

I am convinced that this file can be saved if I can just find the right app that will let me look at code in the header area and compare to good files from the same session. The data is there, but the shotgun approach is just not cutting it. This is a major-label client and I really want to solve this at any expense.

Any suggestions, anybody?

Re: \'save a copy as\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

Yikes, sounds like a stressful one! First stop would be WAV Saver if you haven't tried it already. Beyond that I would try the scatter-gun approach and just load it in every audio playback device/software you can find. I once had a file that opened for some reason in Goldwave and nowhere else. Got decent playback of a wonky file on my flash recorder once too. Quicktime Pro and iTunes sometimes have flukey good luck as well. Pass along the solution if you find it!

Re: \'save a copy as\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

If you can get me the file I can probably repair the header for you.

Rail

Re: \'save a copy as\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

Rail,

The file is 356.3MB. Are you still interested in receiving it? Do you have a location where you would like me to FTP it? If you'd like to follow up on this, please contact me.

BTW, I'm all Mac - no Intel to run your WAV Saver app on.

Thanks in advance.
[email protected]

Re: \'save a copy as\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

WAV Saver wouldn't fix this... you can use any of the free services like yousendit.com or email me and I can set up an FTP location for you to put it on our server.

Rail

Re: \'save copy in\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

As a follow-up to anyone interested in this topic, Rail was able to quickly repair this file, which contained data errors in the header and elsewhere. I did as much research as time would allow to accomplish this myself, but could not find the reference material to help me correct the data I was able to observe in a text editor.

Rail obviously has tremendous expertise that is available to users of ProTools everywhere and I can't recommend him highly enough.

Peter

Re: \'save copy in\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

Backing up your databases can protect an organization against the accidental loss of data, database corruption, hardware/operating system crashes or any natural disasters.
file repair

Re: \'save copy in\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

LOL.. nice try, .. actually, not so nice.

Re: \'save copy in\' damaged a file - file repair advice?
 

FWIW, it's doubtful that your file was corrupted by the "Save copy" process. This FMT header corruption problem doesn't show up until you close and reopen the session that it occurred on. One way to make sure there isn't a problem when you are recording is to show the Workspace/audio files folder of the session when you do record takes, looking at the audio file format column. After each record pass all the files should have a format of ".wav" (or "BWAV"). If after a pass the file type says "unknown," you've got the problem.