Importing corrupt MP3 file - no sound

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Hi
New to Audacity so giving alot of info.

I am trying to import an dictaphone MP3 file that is corrupt. (the file doesn’t open in win media player, adobe audition etc)
The file was deleted/moved from a memory stick and i recovered it using Recuva recovery software.
The file format is MP3 sound format and the size is 99MB - it has no length when displayed in Windows explorer.

When it imports into Audacity its blank, empty i.e. no sound/noise, wavelengths.
Also, the dictaphone file should be over an hour long but is imported with less time e.g. 40 min.

I’ve tried importing the file (not recognised), then importing the raw data - with the raw data i tried a few settings but didn’t know the exact settings to use e.g. Encoding, Byte order.

I’m using Audacity 2.0.5. - the exe, on Windows Vista.

In Audacity both the corrupt and a working dictaphone MP3 file give the following properties:
MME, Speakers, Microphone, 2 (stereo) input channels, 44100 Hz, 32-bit float.

FYI:

A working dictaphone MP3 file in VLC player gives the following Codec properties.
Codec: MPEG Audio layer 1/2/3 (mpga)
Channels: Stereo
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bitrate: 192kb/s.

A working dictaphone MP3 file in Abobe Audition gives the following properties.
Bit Depth: 32 (float)
Source: MP3 192 Kbps CBR

My questions are:

  1. What raw data settings do i use?
  2. If these raw settings do not work what else can i do?

Regards
Donal.

2

Sadly, I think you are out of luck. :frowning: Importing the raw data isn’t going to work because in that case Audacity is looking for uncompressed PCM data.* The “raw” MP3 data is encoded in a way that it’s not recognizable as audio at all unless it’s properly decoded.

You might try a different file recovery tool.

I don’t have a lot of hope, but here are some tools that can diagnose and fix some MP3 problems:
[u]MP3 Diags[/u]
[u]MP3val[/u]
[u]VBRFix[/u]




***** [u]This Tutorial[/u] shows how a digitized waveform is represented by a series of sample values and how you “connect the dots” to reconstruct the waveform.

An uncompressed WAV file is a header (with the sample rate & bit-depth information, etc.) followed by a series of numbers which are the sample values. If you read the bytes and re-assemble the samples correctly, you can create the wave from the raw data. But, an MP3 file does NOT contain a series of sample values and importing it as raw data will give you “random” sample data that sounds like pure noise.

3

Hi DVDdoug,
Thanks for the reply, info and tutorial link. I tried a number of different recovery software and after your reply a number of MP3 repair tools - no joy. :frowning:

Regards.
Donal.