Fixing a corrupt FLAC files ?

Feb 11, 2014 at 5:00 AM Thread Starter Post #1 of 5

Neo-ST

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I had a large collection of FLAC files on HDD1, which I had to move to HDD2.
During that transfer, something happened to FLAC files. I didn't notice until I started playing them.
About 30% of my collection is corrupt, I verified them with AudioTester from vuplayer.com.
It just says "Lost sync @ 1m:36s" (1:36 is just an example, each file is corrupt at the different time stamp).
 
I tried suggested solutions like re-encoding them FLAC-to-FLAC but they cannot be re-encoded since they're corrupt (program halts, no matter which - dbpoweramp, foobar, flac.exe, etc.)
 
For the most part I don't have a backup, so is there a way to fix these files ? 
frown.gif

 
Thanks
 
Feb 11, 2014 at 6:18 PM Post #2 of 5
  I had a large collection of FLAC files on HDD1, which I had to move to HDD2.
During that transfer, something happened to FLAC files. I didn't notice until I started playing them.
About 30% of my collection is corrupt, I verified them with AudioTester from vuplayer.com.
It just says "Lost sync @ 1m:36s" (1:36 is just an example, each file is corrupt at the different time stamp).
 
I tried suggested solutions like re-encoding them FLAC-to-FLAC but they cannot be re-encoded since they're corrupt (program halts, no matter which - dbpoweramp, foobar, flac.exe, etc.)
 
For the most part I don't have a backup, so is there a way to fix these files ? 
frown.gif

 
Thanks

 
If you are sure that the files were corrupted during transfer (and not by a virus), then the chances of recovery are close to zero.
When you move files, it is nearly impossible that a couple of random bytes get corrupted and the rest of the file is intact.
A more likely scenario is that the transfer has been interrupted before finishing due to disk access errors. When that happens, part of a large file could be still in the disk cache memory and if you cancel then the cache gets flushed and the data is lost. For some files it may look like the operation has succeeded, because the directory entry with the file name and the right size has already been created, but part of the file contents have not been saved to disk yet. The "Lost sync" most likely means that the data is missing from that point.
Too late for it now, but if you transfer large quantities of files do that in smaller portions and use Copy rather than Move and then delete files by hand if the copy has been successful. In case of errors fix the issue and copy the files again, until successful. 
 
Feb 11, 2014 at 6:26 PM Post #3 of 5
Thanks for the reply.
Anyway, I had no viruses, checked.
No disk errors, checked.
Something did get sc*ewed up though, and I read I'm not the only one.
Some problem with tag area of flac files gets corrupted easily, don't know the details.
 
Anyhow, from now on, I'm using only this program to copy flac files - Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier.
It can copy slower but safer - It then uses some error checking mechanics to make sure that copies are 1:1 or faster - no error checking and faster than Windows' copy.
So far anything I copied with it had 0 errors.
 

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