Restore Corrupt Audio Files?

[U2502]

Hi there,
A friends of mine was recording 2 tracks to his mbox and his computer locked up. We can see the audio files on the drive but protools will not open them. He was using PT 7.0. I have told him to upgrade to 7.3, which would help with this problem, but I am wondering if there is anything that we can do in the meantime. It seems as though the headers are corrupt. Is there any way to remove the headers from the file and rewrite them? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

--micah

[Roey]

Hi,

Both WAV and AIFF are RIFF files meaning their headers are freely available over the net (check out http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/wavefiles.html). Most likely, Pro Tools either didn't write the header, or it wrote the header but didn't fill in the file (chunk) size. Basically, the headers of all files recorded in Pro Tools are similar, with the exception of their size fields (respective to the file size). The header size is constant (it is than followed by the audio data).

Best way to go about this is get another file that was recorded properly with Pro Tools, simply copy and paste the header, then change the size fields. You can easily find the places need changing by comparing two, properly recorded files of different sizes.

To be sure, work on copies of your corrupted files. You will need a HEX (or Binary) editor. I know that for PC there are more than a few freewares. Here is one for a Mac: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...ools/0xed.html

It should take a minute to someone who knows how to hack binary files.

Cheers,
Roey

[Roey]

One more thing...

The files that you see on the drive, do they have meaningful names (like Audio1_01.wav) or is it gibberish (like zyhdjdjfj).

If its a meaningful name than the (empty) header should be allocated at the beginning of the file and you need to do what I've said in the previous post.

If its gibberish, I'm pretty sure that this is pure audio and you'll need to ADD a header before the information you already got on the file. This can be somewhat more tricky.

By the way, 99.9% that upgrading to 7.3 won't help your friend.

Cheers,
Roey

[James Drake]

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread...Number=1200271