Fix broken wav file

Since we're on Intel, we're little endian. The recording was in stereo, at Also, anything over bit is usually signed. So, I'm feeling good at this point. I ended up with a screen full of white noise. At this point, I'm getting close to giving up. Then I selected it on a word boundary guessing and copied it to the clipboard.

Then I flipped over to the broken WAV and pasted in the first 48 bytes of the header of the working file, up to and including the "data" chunk. Then, I saved the file with a new name and opened it in GoldWave.

Amazing, it worked! Notice the correct WAV format listed in the status bar. It wouldn't have worked with different files. There was a small warning from GoldWave that the header's length differed from reality, but this was fixed by File Save As with a new filename. Miracle of miracles. I thought the show was ruined. This technique was lucky because apparently only the header was missing and I had a header available with the same format. I hope this helps someone with the same problem.

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

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Hey Now Scott, This is a good example of you you can make things work. I don't think I"ll have to do what you did anytime soon, but thx for the info. That is very unlikely.. Assume those are audio data. About Repair broken wav files while preserving metadata. Topics audio wav broadcast repair bwf. Releases 1 v0. Jul 26, Packages 0 No packages published. Contributors 3. You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session. You signed out in another tab or window.

Home Hydrogenaudio Forum General Audio repair broken wav file Notice Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.

This could be tough, but it might be possible A regular WAV file is simply a header followed by sequence of bytes. What's the format bit depth and number of channels? Are you feeling brave or desperate?

I assume I don't have to tell you this, but Make a backup before you start messing around with a hex editor! You can find the WAV spec at wotsit. You don't need to fully understand the spec, but it would be a good idea to take a look at it. A bit stereo file has 4 bytes per stereo-sample. If some data has been lost so that you start reading the 4-byte sequence at the wrong point, the data will be scrambled.