When recording direct to drive/card and the media is removed, power is lost or the recording is not correctly finalised for any other reason, files will not have the correct headers and can appear corrupt.
As a bonus, he’s also created a handy python utility which will look through recorded files and remove anything with a level lower than specified – useful if you armed tracks that weren’t actually in use and now have silent files taking up drive space!
Please note that neither of these tools are officially supported or tested by A&H, so use at your own risk:
@SQuser I don’t see how A&H can prevent this happening in the first place. A power outage or random removal of the recording media is going to have the potential to corrupt files or leave them unfinalised.
I suppose if there’s capacity and the capability within the desk / firmware, the desk could check for problems with any recordings on the card and offer to fix them in desk - though that’s also risky and personally I’d want external copies of any problem files anyway, so I can duplicate them and run multiple attempts / software at them without risking further permanent damage to the original copies.
As a technician, I also see that as unrealistic - especially given the truly rudimentary “Drive” functionality.
That’s why I formulated it in the corresponding request thread:
But the fact is, the reaction was:
And since they haven’t denied it and are still allowing votes on it, we can assume that A&H will have a solution for this.
The regular writes idea is interesting, a kind of primative application level checkpointing, but true journaling isn’t possible with FAT32 and would require a completely different file system, which would bring its own compatibility issues. We’ll have to wait and see what their engineers eventually say. I don’t think they’ll want to move away from FAT32 just for compatibility reasons and easy transfer to any computer.
