Possibly corrupt audio files

[i2productions]

So I just went through my storage locker today and took 2 hard drives out of an old computer of mine, brought them home and connect them to my desktop. I went through them partition by partition to see all my old files, and if there was anything I wanted to keep before formating them. I found some of my old audio projects(some windows so linux) and was very excited as some of them I had no other backups of(from my days of being an audio engineer). I transfered them all to my NAS and tried to play some of them(some .wav, some .mp3), but I come to find out that none of them will load. I tried various players(banshee, XBMC, VLC, and went over to windows for WMP) and none would load them. Checked the properties of the files and all of them in my project folder can't determine the codec, channels, sample rate, or bit rate. Within the same folder are pictures, movies, and windows exe files that all work fine. I find it hard to believe that only the audio files were corrupted. And in other partitions on the same drive, audio files I copied worked. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to recover these?

[StoneCut]

Did you ever mess about with encryption ? That might explain things.
Some things to try:
1) run the "file" command on them from a terminal: file "Some Mp3.mp3" and see what it reports. Maybe your files got saved in a format that is not the same as its extension ? (i had a bunch of .wav files once that were really .mp3 files - "file" uncovered that).
2) run a media player from the terminal/command-line and then load up up one of the files from there - it might tell you what's wrong in the terminal
3) maybe the user rights are wrng on the files. Make sure you have proper read/write/execute permissions as needed.

[Pablo]

Also, there is a useful command line program called "sndfile-info". It is included in "sndfile-programs" package.

sndfile-info /path/to/audio_file.wav

As for StoneCut's second point, I suggest mplayer from the command line. It gives useful info about the audio file is playing.

Cheers, Pablo

[i2productions]

1.)'file' returned an mp3 in the folder as: 'data' (that's not good)
2.)Ran totem in terminal(will try mplayer in a bit, but I don't think it's going to do any more good)

Code: Select all

** Message: Error: Could not determine type of stream.
gsttypefindelement.c(996): gst_type_find_element_activate (): /GstPlayBin2:play/GstURIDecodeBin:uridecodebin0/GstDecodeBin2:decodebin20/GstTypeFindElement:typefind

3.)Full read write permissions

This is the oddest audio file problem I've ever seen

[StoneCut]

Ouch, like you said - "data" isn't good Looks like your data is toast, sorry.