Recover recording after battery died?

[exxile]

Hi folks, I'm guessing the answer to this is 'not possible' but I was recording lots of bands yesterday with an H320 and during the last band the battery ran out. I don't suppose there's any chance of recovering what was recorded up until that point, I guess the battery went down before the file had been written to disk?

cheers

[saratoga]

Assuming it was written to disk and not just in RAM, you could try and run scandisk and see if anything turns up.

[exxile]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I've recharged the iRiver and managed to copy the .wav file to my pc but I can't open/play it in anything - the file size of the .wav is approx. 750Mb - I wonder if there is some utility program that can fix the .wav?

cheers

[Capt_Lou]

It's a bad wav header.  If the header is repaired the music can be played. It can be complicated, but keep trying and don't delete the file. Someone on taperssection should be able to help you if nobody here can.

On possibility (that looks simpler than most) is this that I copied from another site:    

I was able to recover the corrupt WAV file using Goldwave software (www [.] goldwave [.] com).

Goldwave attempts to open the file and prompts that it can not identify the file format. It then opens the file in a RAW format. You are then able to save the file in whatever format you want (including the WAV format).

You can download a fully functional trial version of Goldwave audio editor from their website.


I had a file like this once and it played perfectly after repair. However in my case repair was incredibly simple because it happened with an Edirol R-09 (which has an automatic wav header repair utility built in).

[petur]

Just import it into Audacity as RAW (16bit, 44KHz unless you had it configured otherwise in rockbox)

No need to refer to payware when the solution can be free

[exxile]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I tried Goldwave but it wouldn't accept it, also tried Audacity (including renaming my wav file to pcm or raw) but each attempt, experimenting with different settings, imported the file as white noise. The file was a straight 16bit, 44KHz wav format.

However, after searching on some forums I tried to open it in 'Samplitude' and that seems to have fixed it in next to no time. I'm so relieved. It turns out to be about 74mins in length, but I'm sure the 'Rockbox Info' was telling me there was about 2hrs of battery life left before I hit the rec button. Ah well, I guess it's prob just the age of the battery...but still, over the course of the day I'd managed to record approx 6.5hrs of music so not too bad.

Does switching the iRiver on/off (maybe 8-9 times over a 10hr period) have as much effect on the battery life as opposed to say, just leaving the unit switched on constantly?

cheers

[petur]

strange, audacity should have done the trick. Make sure you import as raw

[Multiplex]

There's a thread here including a tiny utility to fix the header here http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=1862.0 - basically the file may be OK but the WAV header is not updated on the shut-down so apps that (correctly) rely on the length from there will fail to load the file - loading as raw should work but will read the header as samples too so you should delete the first 10-20 samples.

Shutting down and starting up an iRiver does take quite a lot file activity on the hard disk, it is undoubtedly true that leaving the player switched on but idle (display and backlight off, CPU at low speed) for a period of time would use less power - but when is the break even?
A similar debate was caused by a suggestion I made here; http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=19239.0

[exxile]

Thanks for the info & links guys, appreciated

[Capt_Lou]

No need to refer to payware when the solution can be free

I certainly agree with your philosophy, petur but I was recommending a free solution, although it didn't work out exxile. I was obviously recommending downloading the fully functional trial version of Goldwave.

[AlexP]

No need to refer to payware when the solution can be free

I certainly agree with your philosophy, petur but I was recommending a free solution, although it didn't work out exxile. I was obviously recommending downloading the fully functional trial version of Goldwave.

I suspect he might have meant free as in open, not free as in no money involved.

[Multiplex]

Given the reference to 'payware' I think the meaning of free is monetary in this context - as in beer ;-)