How to salvage recording from X32 USB recorder

Mitch Miller

Sophomore
Oct 30, 2012
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It is well known that one *must* stop the USB recorder on the X32 before powering down or removing the USB stick, or the audio track will be lost. I don't normally use the USB recorder, so I'm not in the habit of thinking about this, and this past weekend, the urgency to get packed up resulted in my shutting down the X32 without stopping my recording first.

When I opened the USB stick on my laptop, the file entry was there, but had no last modified time, and a zero byte size. :(~:-(~:sad: Using what I know about computers and the FAT filesystem, I set out to see if I could recover the track.

Turns out it was pretty simple. Here is a summary of the steps I took.

1) Insert the USB stick into (Windows) computer, open My Computer, right-click USB drive and click Properties.
2) On the Tools tab, run the check for errors and leave the checkbox in the automatically fix option (this runs chkdsk /f).
3) Open the resulting salvaged file (in the FOUND.000 folder of the USB drive) in Audacity using the Import --> Raw Data function. Don't change anything (except possibly the bitrate, if needed).
4) Export the audio from Audacity into a new WAV file somewhere new (i.e. don't overwrite your salvaged file).

I have not (yet) recreated the situation and walked through this process a second time, but I expect this to be a pretty consistently successful recovery method.
 
Re: How to salvage recording from X32 USB recorder

Very cool workaround for a potentially common problem. It's easy to forget that your mixer is a computer and just pulling the plug is a bad idea.

I certainly wouldn't rely on this as being able to work every time, as the type of corruption that can occur on a drive with unexpected power downs could be one of many things, but simply not having a properly closed file is an easy one to deal with.
 
Thanks you for posting this. This saved me big time. The only thing I had to change was the bit rate. Needed to be 16 and the default was 8.
 
I located the file, and right-clicked on "properties," but there is no "tools" tab, just "general" and "details." What "tools" tab? Am I misunderstanding here?

It's on an SD card, recorded on a Zoom H2N, and the first thing I did when I got home was to pull out the SD card and copy the file onto my computer. It's showing 1.7G, about the right size, so surely my audio is there.
 
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Hi Janice,
You have to right-click on the drive containing the file (ie your SD card) not the file itself to get the version of the properties popup that includes the Tools submenu. In my example below, the E drive called Store N Go is a USB stick.

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