Corrupt Audio Files: How to Repair

Today we will provide a few tricks to recover corrupt audio files.

Whether you’re a professional using Apple’s Logic Studio or AVID Pro Tools, an extreme biker torturing the last GoPro camera or a video aficionado editing the last family gathering with Windows Movie Maker, you can end up fighting with a corrupt WAV, M4A, AIF or QuickTime MOV audio file.

Your fight is really unfair: Even if you are a skilled computer guy, you probably will spend hours on that, to no avail. Professional video and audio repair services exist for a reason. We have spent the last 5 years developing recovery tools for Mac and a web video repair app to give you predictable results.

You’ve been warned.

Do It Yourself: Linear PCM Audio Repair

Note that the techniques below only work for Linear PCM format and for containers mentioned below. We won’t be able to repair an .m4a file containing AAC with those methods, for example.

• How to repair a corrupt MOV file containing Linear PCM audio using “Transplant” technique
  Note that if you have a good audio file with exactly same settings than damaged one, and whose size is bigger, you can use it as placeholder and skip step 1.
• How to repair a corrupt AIFF file using “Container Correction” technique
• How to repair a corrupt WAV file using “Container Correction” technique

Unfortunately, repairing compressed audio formats like AAC or ALAC (Apple Lossless) is much more complex and we’ll leave it for future posts.