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Weird audio file problem
Folks, a friend of mine has recorded his band “live” using a simple, stereo microphone and a no-name, freebie audio program (don’t know the name, sorry) straight into a laptop using a Tascam interface.
He ended up recording three sets, each about 45 mins long, at 44.1 kHz and 16 bit. Sets 2 & 3 work fine in all media players.
But Set 1, which he’s since passed on to me using a thumb drive, is weird. The file is also 44.1 kHz/16 bit, the size is roughly 700Mb, it’s supposedly a .wav file… yet everything I try to use for opening it only brings up a 5 second 860K sized file (you can hear crowd noise, so it’s definitely the gig).
Anyone got any idea what’s happening here? Or suggestions on how to access the other 699Mb of the file? I’ve tried Audition, Sound Forge and Reaper and they all only open the first 5 seconds.
Cheers, Bag.
Graeme Hague
Author/Composer
Freelance Audio Engineer -
4 Replies
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Hello Graeme and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.
You don’t mention if the original file plays.
Regards,
Ty Ford
Want better production audio?: Ty Ford’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Watch Ty play guitar -
Thanks Ty, sorry- no, I can’t even get the original file to play apart from that first 5 seconds, although at 700Mb there’s undoubtedly data there to tap into. Mike Velte has suggested a website with lots of audio file “fixers” (that I haven’t looked at yet) but I suspect they’ll be file converters, MP3 encoders, etc- though you never know, so I’ll check it out.
I would have thought that if the likes of Audition or Sound Forge can’t interpret the entire file, then what hope have shareware programs?
At this point I’m wondering about simply changing the file’s extension in Explorer (from.wav to .aiff for example- but that wouldn’t work) and forcing Audition or SF to examine the file in a different way. Any ideas what to try?
I don’t understand how all the file properties indicate a huge audio file, yet it only opens a small one.
Hmmm… wondering if one of the Windows DOS utilities might fix any corruptions in the file, but I’m getting out of my depth.Cheers, Bag.
Graeme Hague
Author/Composer
Freelance Audio Engineer -
Graeme,
Over my pay scale as well. I think what you have there is a corrupted file. Make a copy of it and mess with the copy.
If you left or right click on it do you get a drop down menu with any options?
Perhaps some code warrior can help.
You might try the newsgroup rec.audio.pro
Sorry for your pain.
Ty Ford
Want better production audio?: Ty Ford’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Watch Ty play guitar -
If you have established that the original file on the laptop behaves the same way, then the thumb-drive copy is not the problem.
You can calculate how many samples are good, and figure out exactly how far into the WAV file the problem happens. Then you can use a binary file editor to examine the bytes in the file to see if you can see any anomoly in the bit-stream inside the WAV file. If there is just a brief interruption in the data, you can try removing the bad part and pick up the bit-stream after the problem. But if you see that everything after the spot is zeroes or something, then you are out of luck. Or maybe you can find someone who can do this for you as a favor (or for $$$ if it is worth the expense.)
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