So, if you have never heard the phrase “corrupt wave header” then I hate you and your fluffy happy little world you live in…!

For the rest of us that have had the distinct displeasure of experiencing this I’ll relate my sickening experience….

I had a client call and ask for me to send over some stems from a project we wrapped up months ago.  I was initially convinced I had already sent them, but much to my chagrin I had not. Then we all remembered the details….rush project….right at Holidays……etc…

So I pulled the sessions off the Archive drive and…….Pro-tools would not open most of the sessions with an error that said something like “…this session was created with an earlier version of Pro-Tools”…..which I know is not the case because I have not updated since these were created.  I immediately got a very very bad feeling.  I found a session that would open and started to brighten up…..

Once the session was open none of the media would reconnect!  I could see the media on the drive and Pro-Tools was recognizing that the files were on the drive, but was refusing to link to them…oh shit.

We eventually determined that the “wave headers” were corrupt.  That meant that the files were unreadable by the computer.  By unreadable I mean the computer knew they were there and knew the file names, but had no idea what kind of file it was.  Appearantly the “wave header” tells the computer what exactly the little 101010101001’s are supposed to mean.  So our files had no way of telling the computer “hey, I’m an audio file!”….these files would not play in ANY audio software we tried at all.

We noticed some software while reading on the Digidesign User Conference that was designed to repair wave headers so we downloaded all of them to try…..nothing!!!!…..oh shit!

We had decided that the situation was almost not resolvable and I felt physically ill…..

After I had almost given up I scoured through some Forums and learned something.  Some software will import the RAW data and let you rebuild the wave header data on import!!!! OMG, I’m like so close…but I had little real hope….

Enter Audacity….a free software that will allow you to import RAW data.  So I got it and imported the RAW data and was presented with a window that asked me to enter the wave header info…..I did and BAM!!!!! I could not believe it….my file loaded…!

OK…step one done….now I faced the fact that I had like 350 files I hed to manually import, enter wave header information and then export and reimport to Pro-Tools and re link……needless to say this took me a while, but in the end I did it!

There is a lot more this episode, but I’m tired of it and just want to put it to bed!

The moral of this story is……this took me a long time and really sucked and I hope it never happens again!