I have a Creative Nomad Muvo NX which I bought when I started running earlier this year. These days, I tend to prefer to run without music, but I still use the Muvo quite a bit. One of its nice features is that while being extremely small, it can still act as a low-quality voice recorder that holds up to eight hours of recordings.
So, just for fun, the other night I stuck it in my pocket when I went to a comedy club. I was curious as to the quality I’d get. After the show, I hooked it up to my car adapter to confirm that the recording worked. It did, and though the quality wasn’t exactly hi-fi, it was decent enough.
When I got home, I went to transfer the file to my computer so that I could touch up the audio. Before I did, I renamed the file. After it was done transferring, I tried to load up the file and was told that it was an unrecognized format. I couldn’t listen to it, I could edit it, nothing. I tried a bunch of different programs to try and fix the corrupted WAV file, restore deleted versions of the file, and even edit the file directly with a hex editor. Nothing worked.
Enter the kind Gordon Gidluck, who wrote wavscript. After using a trial version of his program without success, he said to go ahead and send the file to him and he’d take a look at it. Turns out someone else had this very problem a couple weeks earlier. The problem: a single byte, the first one, out of a 30 megabyte file, was wrong. Since it was the first byte the file, it ended up corrupting the header. So, I went back into the hex editor, changed the first byte in the file and everything magically started working.
So, if you have a Muvo and the file gets corrupted, then now you know how to fix it. The Ping’s all about sharing knowledge, after all.
Posted in Technology