First of all hello, I found this forum searching for help with this problem and it seems like a very knowledgeable and informative place. (background on my problem) I am a a musician and I have a digital recording studio. I have many master wav files and keep them on CD's I use Acoustica ( http://www.aconas.com ) audio editor, very nice software and Stian is a very helpful person when it comes to help with his software, I highly recommend it. I also use T-Racks for mastering my wav files. I am using Adaptec software to burn my cds, audio as well as data. I was going back over some work and loaded one of my wav masters to edit and none of my audio software could open it. I checked my file properites and found under summary that all of the properties were gone. I copied them to my system from the CD and still the same problem. Some of my files are fine and open, but several are not. Here is my question. Is there a way to restore the properties of my wav files, perhaps through the registry, or some other way? I tried opening them with all of my wares and nothing seems to work. I hope someone can help me with this. Thanks in advance.
I'm not sure If I understand you correctly: You have stored .wav files on data CD-Rs. And now you can't open these .wav files anymore, even if you've copied them to HDD before. - Right? What I don't get about this: If data CD-Rs get corrupted in my experience either files are accessible (=all errors can be corrected by the drive's error correction) or not (=uncorrectable errors; Windows refuses to access the file at all). Anyway, I have two ideas about your problem: 1. Use some recovery software like CD Data Rescue or Bad Copy to extract damaged files from CD-R to HDD 2. Rename a .wav file you can't open to .pcm and use Cool Edit Pro (fully functional 30 day trial version available) to open. You'll have to tell the program the properties (bit depth, sampling rate), so If you don't know them anymore it'll be trial-and-error, but if you listen to the files you'll know when you've used the right settings.
HI Tigre, thanks for the response, That is absolutely correct. I believe what has happened here is that the files themselves were corrupted either in transference to the cd-r or when they were edited at some point by one of my other wares and then copied to the cd-r. Either way I'll give your CEP suggestion a try. Fortunately all of my wav's have the same properties so I can get the specs from one of the other files. Do I save the PCM as a WAV after using CEP? As far as your first suggestion, I'm not sure if that will fix the actual problem as the files themselves seem to have lost their integrity . The wierd thing is they will play on WMP and QCd player. SO I'm not sure what happend to them. Anyhow, THANKS
Yes. Maybe you have to delete the 1st few samples (= Wav header) manually. What exactly are the properties BTW? You're right. From your additional info the problem should be somewhere else. Anyway, as CD-Rs die quite quickly it might be a good idea to look into backup alternatives, e.g. - if you use lossless compression (flac, monkey's audio, ...) and error recovery files (PAR 2) you can fit the same (or more) on a CD-R but have much more security against data loss. A bit easier but not free: RAR archives + error recovery data. - You could consider using additional HDD(s) to store your valuable files - the price/GB is about the same as if you use CD-R media. Now we're getting somewhere. Instead of trying CoolEdit you could use the diskwriting feature of foobar2000 (accurate audio player - if you can play back the files with it too; if you can't it'll give an error message with helpful information): http://foobar2000.hydrogenaudio.org In this thread http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/41535 I gave some advice how to use it. Of course you should disable resampling, replaygain and dithered output and set output to the bit depth of your original files to get bit identical results.
Wow lots of info, I will check in to the second suggestion it sounds much more like what I need to do. The properties are: Audio Format PCM Average Data Rate 176.400 kb/second Sample Rate 44.100khz Audio Sample Rate 16 bit Channels 2 (Stereo) I'll do as you suggest and get back to you as soon as I have some results to offer. I certainly appreciate your help with this. As far as storage I invested in a USB 2.0 card and an 80 gig USB 2.0 HDD, some time back I don't intend to use CD-R's for storage of important stuff anymore, these were older mixes i did before I wised up on the storage situation. I also have a Syquest cart drive but it's too slow, I like the real time feel of the USB 2.0, thanks again and I'll let you know what happens.
By the way I forgot to mention that the files in question were marked "read only" instead of "archive". All the wav files that were OK were "archive". I don't know if this bit of info helps with the situation more. Thanks
Could be that this is the reason - players are read only while audio editors are not ... Have you tried copying the files to HDD, rightclick in explorer and change properties from readonly to archive?
I tried that when I found the problem, and I just tried it again, no go. I'll go on with the foobar player idea. One of my fellow musician friends in another forum at Digitalmusic.com mentioned it before and I've been curious aout it anyway
Success, unfortunately none of the options worked, BUT I had forgotten I have Audacity audio editor (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ it's free) and the wav opened in that software and I was able to resave the file and all of it's properties were returned. Thanks for all your help and I do appreciate your time.
Unfortunate turn, this was a partial fix. It seems the disk is corupted, some of the files are partially gone. I am trying CDRoller, as nothing else has worked.
I've recently started to edit wav files, converting them from mono to stereo. Once the wav files are stereo, I want to be able to change each of the channels, but I'm confused on how to access the channels.What should I do?
Hi Tthom3, go to the link for audacity I provided. It is an Audio Editor I believe it will give you access to both sides of the stereo file independently. If that doesn't work go to http://www.aconas.com and check out Acoustica Audio Editor, it is not free like Audacity but has a 30 day fully functional free trial period. Good luck.
