OT: Audio problems

I know this is a little bit off topic, but I don't know where to turn, and I'm hoping someone here has experience with this.

I have a Marantz PMD660 - Solid State audio recorder (compact flash)

Typically, I record my audio and hit stop which "finalizes" the file, as I understand it. This weekend, I was recording a concert and immediately after, pulled the power to the soundboard, which I was plugged in to. Now, the recorder says there are is nothing recorded, and plugging the card into my computer, it says there is a file, but the size is 0kb. I contacted Marantz tech support, who weren't much help, and told me to use a third party file recovery program, but couldn't name one or give any specific ideas on what I was supposed to do with the software.

Anyone here have any expertise in this area?

Thanks!

Casey Petersen
United Video

> This weekend, I was recording a concert and immediately after, pulled the power to the
> soundboard, which I was plugged in to.
> I contacted Marantz tech support, who weren't much help, and told me to use a third
> party file recovery program

I don't think there's anything to recover at all. Many of these compact recorders don't write the audio file until you stop the recording and let it process. I've had that happen with a Zoom H4 (uses an SD card) where the live keyboardist turned off the AC power to his booth when I was still recording the stage play, and there was *nothing* recorded when the recorder powered back up. Luckily I still had the camera audio with two discreet gain controls, so I processed that. But it was still a recording from the back of the small theatre.

Did you record the concert going into the live sound-mix board? Did you get camera sound? Because I'm fairly certain you're out of luck with the CF card. Next time, some options to consider are:

a) Don't record the whole concert in one take. Stop/start the recorder in between songs. Syncing a few dozen more timelines is certainly worth it compared with getting no usable audio.

b) If the concert is short enough, or if you have some downtime in between, use batteries instead, and change them out when they're low.

c) Record at MP3 resolution. In the case of my Zoom, the MP3 setting seems to make the batteries last longer than on the 44.1kHz or 48kHz WAV settings. It could be an illusion, but for this kind of guerilla recording, MP3 is usually good enough if it allows you to use batteries.


www.derekmok.com

I fear that Derek is right on this one.
However, while the third party file recovery apps are mostly aimed at photo recovery, they can find other files. Google SD card Photo card recovery or something similar.
If you are able to recover a file but it is mangled, Audacity has a Raw audio file reading function that I was able to use on a Zoom type recorder card that had become corrupted after being used at a depth below spec on a scuba dive. It just looks for audio type data and not headers. Very impressive when you hand back recovered files that even the TV station engineers couldn't find.

ak
Sleeplings, AWAKE!

Thanks Derek!

I saw a typo I made where I meant to say the sound board operator unplugged my recorder...I never unplug someone else's gear without asking first!

Fortunately, I had also run a line from the board to my camera, which the same guy accidentally muted for about a minute...I know it wasn't there on my Marantz because I came out of a different place on the board, and I had checked it when I saw I was having trouble with the camera feed. I did have 2 camera mics that sounded surprisingly well, so I think I can recover from this fairly well.

Backup, backup, backup!