wav file recovery from interrupted Qu-Drive multitrack recording

Hi All,

Just thought I’d share this data-point here since I wasn’t able to find this information, and essentially had to trial-and-error my way to a solution.

Last night I was using the Qu-Drive feature on a Qu-32 to record 18 tracks of multitrack to a sandisk external SSD. A power interruption killed the board before I was able to stop the recording, corrupting the files. I was sure I had lost the data (which in this case was for a purely volunteer gig with the recording as a bonus, not a primary goal. So not the end of the world). Someone mentioned to me that VLC might be able to read a file even if it were corrupted, so I should try and recover it that way. Well, that didn’t work, but once I started reading, searching, and trying different things, my hope to recover these increased, and eventually I was able to do so using Audacity’s Raw Data import tool.

First, I used the ‘chkdsk’ command in windows (through cmd.exe) to let windows find any data that wasn’t properly stored/formatted/etc. Because the disk for me was the D: drive, I used [chkdsk D: /f] without the brackets, which made my previously 512 Byte large corrupted files now a seemingly correct size. (around 800MB each) I used Audacity to try and open them, but it was still unable to, and VLC gave me audio, but it was clearly random digital distortion. I eventually found that using the following settings resulted in my original audio, and I was able to then use Audacity to export them as Wav files again, ready to be dropped into Protools!

Encoding: Signed 24-bit PCM
Byte Order: little-endian
Channels: 1-channel(mono)
start offset: 512 Bytes
Amount to import: 100%
Sample Rate: 48000 Hz

Hopefully this will be useful to someone somewhere so they don’t have to hunt and peck those settings!

brilliant thank you

Ha ! I hope I”ll never need this but thank you very much for the tip !

Btw: on several occasions I forgot to properly stop recordings before powering down and never until now had the issue the files were broken. Probably just lucky I guess…

Again, thanks !

Giga

I’ve had randomly corrupted files every now and again when recording multitrack audio on my QU24. Recording wasn’t interrupted in any way.
I’m on mac so it would be good to find a way of fixing the files that get corrupted. Generally in file info they report the correct length but only play for a fraction of a second in VLC.
Any mac tips anyone?

Thanks for your Tipp! Resolve my interupted Power Problem, Multitrack Record works now fine!

Thank you so much!!! You just saved my bacon!

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