Recovering Lost .WAV and .AIFF files

.wav and .aiff files are a wonderful thing, when they work. Most of the time they do. But if your computer or recording program crashes before you stop recording it can be a real pain to recover them, but it can be done.

Here's the scenario:

I was recording the podcast, and while protools was recording, it crashed.

First off, I had to grab the files out of the session name/Audio Files/ folder, and stash them away elsewhere on the hard drive to prevent protools from overwriting them when I started recording again.

Next, I got a program called AIFF From PCM Point is, a WAV ir AIFF file is simply PCM audio encoding with a bit of meta data in either end. Without the metadata, Quicktime, Audacity, Protools, and any other app i tried refused to open the file.

AIFF from PCM has one major flaw, If the file in question is not perfectly divisible by (Bytes Per sample * tracks) in my case 3, (24-bit mono files...) If refuses to operate on the file in question. Having encountered this situation, and bailing myself out with a demo version of Sony's Sound Forge, I knew I would have to throw out the first bit of the file to get the rest of the data to line up. Incedentally, I also had to remove one bit from the end to get the file to convert, (YMMV, depending on app, and record settings.)

So in comes 0xED, a tool you can get free from Apple.
With 0xED I was able to delete the first and last bytes from my damaged audio files, convert them to AIFF, and bring them back into Protools.

If you have a little time and inclination you can do this yourself without having to buy or pirate any software.