Rescuing a recording on my ZoomH2?

[Sebastian Drude]

Hi Greg,

I guess there is hope, put it depends on your digital skills.

First, I would transfer every and anything that is on the device to a
computer HDD, even deleted and hidden files.  Do not edit anything on the
device itself; the file might be actually there (invisible) and zou might
overwrite valuable information if you try to do anything on the device.

For recovering deleted files I personally like to use Back2life for the
Total Commander file manager, http://grandutils.com/Back2Life4TC/, but there
are other good tools around.

Then you have to figure out which is the file which was created but not
properly saved during the recording.  The date tag may help, but also file
size.  I am not sure that it is the file that reports to have the size of
the device itself, because what failed was the battery, not storage
capacity, right?  But that depends on how your device starts a new file etc.

Once you have the file identified, and safely saved on a normal HDD, you
probably will have to fix it.

I had once a broken WAV file which would not open nor play, although the
content was there.
One possibility to fix sich a file is to change manually the header, where
the lenght (time duration) is indicated.  Probably it still says "0 sec",
which is why the file does not work.  Using a simple text editor (but
probably you will havve to use a different editor than Notepad, which does
not open very large files), find the place in the header and change the
value.  There are several how-to manuals around in the internet, google
terms such as "fix broken wave sound file header".

Actually, I remember I used Soundforge for fixing the file.  I just had to
change the options when opening the file -- instead of opening it as a plain
WAV file (which is the default, but will fail due to the wrong duration tag
in the header), I opened it as a RAW SOUND FILE, if I remember it correctly
(else test other possible options) -- then the header will be ignored.
Saving the file back as WAV produced a clean file which would also work with
other devices.
Possibly, after the proper recording the file still goes on and on with
other information or just white noise -- use Soundforge (or Audacity or a
similar tool) to delet that final part.

For future recordings, especially when you know the batteries may fail at
some point, consider configuring your device to start automatically a new
sound file each X (for instance, 5) minutes, so you will loose less if
everything goes wrong. The litte extra work it will take you to join the
files again to one large audio file (again, with Soundforge or similar) is
certainly worth it.

Hope that helps, good luck,

Sebastian

2010/8/28 Greg Dickson <munanga at bigpond.com>

> Hi all,
>
> Can anyone help me?
>
> I was using my ZoomH2 to record a long language session yesterday.  The
> batteries died after about an hour which I didn't think was a total disaster
> because I thought the Zoom would save the file before it completely
> shutdown.  But now I'm panicking slightly because the file seems to be
> error-ridden and untransferable.  It is using up storage space (~500MB) so
> there is *something* there, but it doesn't playback, upload or anything
> else.  It doesn't give a duration either (it just has 00:00:00).
>
> Is there anything I can do or is the recording lost forever??
>
> Cheers,
> Greg.
>



-- 
Sebastian
-- 
Sebastian.Drude at googlemail.com
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/personal/drude-en.html<http://www.germanistik.fu-berlin.de/il/pers/drude-en.html>
!! PLEASE DO NOT USE my former accounts @ *fu-berlin.de* ANY MORE !!
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