[Adam Loveday-brown]

Hi All.

The company I used in Epsom UK were able to successfully recover all of my lost data! This was for a multitrack recording:
Stereo LR
Mono 1
Mono 2
Mono 3

For some reason the Zoom H6 unit shut down without loosing power, but it didn’t correctly finalise the recording.

This thread has been invaluable in making this happen, and the engineer wouldn’t have gotten there without all the work of everyone on here, so thank you. This has really saved my bacon.

The company are called OnTrack. It’s a proper company, I went there. It’s all very CSI. They take data protection very seriously:
https://www.ontrack.com
I was dealing with a guy called Joe Rogers.

Good luck!!

Adam

Video production dude, London

[Adam Loveday-brown]

Hi Carlo.

Sorry for the slow reply. I didn’t get hold of Karl unfortunately.

I’ve been to so many data recovery companies now it’s getting ridiculous. Zoom UK haven’t been able to help either. They said they would try and put me in contact with Zoom Japan but no dice yet. Zoom UK seemed to think this was a very unusual situation, I pointed out that it’s a common flaw in their systems. For me the unit didn’t loose power, I actually switched the unit off at the end of the recording and it shut down without saving the files properly. This really shouldn’t be physically possible if the files are not written, the unit should either warn you or just take longer to switch off.

Of about 100 different data recovery companies only one seems to actually understand the issue. They are based here in the UK and are called Ontrack.

They haven’t been successful yet but they are on the right path. I basically gave them all of the information on this thread and also did some successful recordings for reference.
We are up to this stage: “It’s more like I have a long audio that’s missing certain intervals, So can hear for 3 seconds then drops for 2 etc, so just need to find out the length in bytes before the next channel is stored, as on disk it’s not sequential.”

If successful I will post here. Not cheap either, £250. However I really, really need this audio so will keep going no matter what. @ Karl Chelette, there are a few of us out here who would gladly pay for you to work your magic!

Video production dude, London

[Adam Loveday-brown]

Hi All.

Creative Cow newb here so apologies if I get the etiquette wrong!

Same multi-track problem here, although recorded on a Zoom H6 this time.

Adobe audition was working better for me.
It seems that Karl Chelette is basically a genius and knows what to do!

Karl, any chance I can pay you to help me recover my audio? Or anyone else that gets it?
I’m all good up until the bit where you get super clever:

Then I made an image file of the test recording and opened it up in HXD hex editor. I found out that with my zoom r24 recorder, when recording, it records 393216 bytes of each channel sequentially and when done writes the wav header with data location, recording format etc. When turned off improperly the wav header is not written and the data that is there is in alternating blocks of each channel.
Using HXD hex editor I found the start of the data and saved this as a new file, which I then used the split option in HXD and split the file into chunks of 393216 bytes, named 0001 and up. Then I opened the folder with the file chunks into it and squised the screen down till I could view 2 rows of files, about 4,000 of them. Then I selected the odd row on the left and cut and pasted it into a new folder. Then using HXD, I concatenated (joined) the odd file numbers together, then did the same for the even ones. This left me with in my case, the data for both mono channels. Then I imported the test recording file in HXD and pasted the recovered data into the proper space, which was at 60000 hex location. The next thing I had to alter was the last 4 bytes before the data which tell the file length data. Repeated the same for the other channel then voila, both channels recovered, no echo, synced properly, 3 hours worth back!!!!!