Imagine you just recorded a great interview for your podcast only to find out the audio file won’t play back on your computer. You can’t go back and record it again because the interviewee is a busy person who was barely able to fit you into their schedule. I’ve had that sick feeling in my stomach a few times in my life.
Few things are more frustrating than losing data to a corrupted media file, especially when it’s one-of-a-kind data like a interview with your favorite author. I recently ran into a corrupt WAV file on a Compact Flash card and couldn’t copy the file because after a few seconds of file transfer the copy process failed. Enter WAV Saver, a simple utility designed to salvage audio data from WAV files.
The app works by copying the contents of a WAV file to a new file, saving whatever bits are possible. If the WAV merely has corrupt headers or didn’t properly mark an end of file, WAV Saver should copy the whole thing to a workable file without a hitch. In cases where the storage media is the problem, WAV Saver is fallible and can only copy a file up to the point where an error is encountered, but it is a better solution than losing WAV data altogether. In some cases, repeating the operation a few times results in capturing more of the audio file, depending on if the corrupt sections of a drive are merely flaky or truly damaged. [Windows $0.00]