Help a journalist trying to recover corrupt audio file?

Hi everyone,
I’m out of my depth here but wondering if someone can help. I am a journalist on deadline and accidentally deleted a file on my Sony ICD-UX560 voice recorder this morning containing audio of an important interview for a story I have due tomorrow. I was able to use file recovery software (EaseUS) to recover what I think is the correct mp3 file – it has the same name and it’s the correct size – but it doesn’t open as an mp3 file using VLC or iTunes, so I think it has been corrupted or damaged somehow. Friends told me to try opening it with Audacity. It won’t open as a standard audio file (it ends up being just clicks), so I’m thinking it’s worth opening it as raw data, but I don’t have any clue what parameters to choose when opening the raw data (encoding / byte order / channels etc). Does anyone happen to know what settings I’d want, or even if I’m on the right track here to recover the file? Thanks!

“Import RAW” can work for WAV and AIFF files, but not for MP3 or any other “compressed” format.

The Sony ICD-UX560 manual indicates that the recorder does record in MP3 format. Does your recovered file have “.mp3” as the file extension? If not, you could try renaming it so that it does and then see if it will play.

The most efficient way to “delete” something is not to go painfully around mopping up all the little pieces and segments. What usually happens is the machine deletes the ability to find the work. The show then “looks like” empty space and the next thing you record steps on the old work.

Undeleters look for occupied spaces that don’t have addresses and it tries to put them back together. The more well-behaved and simple your system is the better.

Did you record anything after you deleted the work? If you did, then that’s the end of the world.

Koz