Questions & Answers

Solution to Corrupted WAV files from Power loss/ Powering Down whilst recording to SD Card

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asked Dec 11, 2023 in MyPreSonus Questions by RubenKillian (130 points)

How to recover your Multi-track recording caused by power loss or shutting down the console whilst you were still recording to the SD card:

Windows↓

1. Insert the SD card into the computer and open a Command Prompt Terminal in admin mode (search cmd then right-click on command prompt, and click on: run as administrator).

2. Type "chkdsk [drive letter]:/f ", replace [drive letter] with the letter assigned by your computer to the SD card (open File Explorer and look at the letter in brackets). !!IMPORTANT!! if you are asked if you want to convert lost chains into files reply Yes/ Y.

3. After the computer has done its thing and it replied with XXXXXXkB recoverd, XXXX files restored... you can close the window and enable "Show Hidden items" (do a quick Google search and find how to do it for your version of Windows, the ways vary for each version.

4. In File Explorer go into the main directory of the SD card and find the "FOUNDXXX" folder, if you can't find it make sure you have "Hide Important System Files" disabled so you can see them. In the folder, you will find lots of "FOUNDXXX.CHK" files.

Simply find the file/s that are most likely the WAV files you are looking for and rename the ".CHK" part to "WAV" (the WAV files are usually large files while the 32kB files are channel placeholders that can be ignored).

5. Copy the renamed "FOUNDXXX.WAV" files to your computer and install/ open Audacity (link to get it: Audacity ® | Downloads (audacityteam.org)

6. In Audacity click on File (top left) and click on Import then Raw Data, in the popup select the "FOUNDXXX.WAV" files you want to recover (hold control [ctrl] to select more than 1 item at a time).

7. Then on the new popup with all the options select the following:

Encoding: Signed 24-bit PCM

Byte Order: Little-endian

Channels: Mono (SD card records every channel separately)

Start offset: 2

Amount to Import: 100%

Sample Rate: 48000 (if finished audio is sped up or slowed down change this value respectively) (lower = slower)

Then click "Import"

8. You can listen to and rename each audio file in Audacity by clicking solo to listen to only it and right-clicking to rename.

If you want to skip forward just pause, set/ click the time you want to listen to, then play.

9. After you have everything renamed and ready, you can go back to "File" but this time click on "Export" then "Export Multiple". Choose a location then click export to start exporting all you tracks. The different audio tracks will be separated into different files at your chosen location.

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