As Sebastian says, the problem is most likely the header. WAV files
begin with a header which in the simplest standard-conforming case is
44 bytes long. This header contains information about the
representation of the audio and its duration. When recording in real
time, it is of course impossible to fill in the duration information
correctly - you have to leave those four bytes blank, or set them to 0,
then come back and fill in the correct information once the recording
is complete and you know its duration. Anything that terminates the
recording before it is possible to go back and clean up the header will
result in bad duration information.<br>
<br>Depending on how your device writes data to the disk, which is a
function both of the drive technology and the software, the most
recently recorded audio data may also be missing or corrupted by the
loss of power.<br>
<br>As already noted, one approach is simply to remove the header, then
convert the resulting raw file back to WAV. In this case, you may need
to provide the converter with information about the audio since it
can't get it from the header. Note, by the way, that if you tell the
converter that your corrupted WAV file is a raw file, it does not
actually strip the header - after all, you've told it there isn't any.
Rather, what it does is treat the header as the first bit of audio
data. The result is that the first few samples of your new audio file
will be garbage. This won't make any real difference though since at
typical sampling rates the garbage will have a duration of about 1
millisecond.<br>
<br>The other approach is to edit the WAV file header, which, however,
takes a bit of computing expertise. The duration is the length of the
audio chunk in bytes, expressed as a 4 byte little-endian unsigned
integer. If the WAV file is in the simplest standard-conforming format,
those four bytes will be bytes 40-43 (assuming that the first byte of
the file is numbered zero). Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to
encounter "WAV files" that do not conform to the standard, and it is
also common for them to be standard-conforming but contain additional,
usually unnecessary, chunks. (The WAV format is, from a linguistic
point of view, much more complex than necessary. WAV files potentially
contain all sorts of stuff of interest only to the entertainment
industry, such as play lists and cue lists.)<br>
<br>For those interested, my own lecture notes on audio files are at:<br><a href="http://www.billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/LectureNotes/AudioData.html#wave" target="_blank">http://www.billposer.org/Linguistics/Computation/LectureNotes/AudioData.html#wave</a><br>
and a beautifully illustrated explanation of WAV file format can be found at:<br><a href="http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/courses/422/projects/WaveFormat/" target="_blank">http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/courses/422/projects/WaveFormat/</a>