Question m4a audio file corrupted... possible to repair?

[Muse]

It's about 10mb, was the 2nd of two sound recordings recordings I made with my Windows phone a couple weeks ago, and the one that counts. The first plays in players, the 2nd throws errors in them, various error messages. My Total Recorder says "the byte stream type of the given URL is unsupported." Might it be possible to retrieve the audio?

 

[WelshBloke]

Make a copy of the file first. Have you tried playing it in VLC player on a PC? That tries to fix simple errors in the file if it finds any.

 

[Muse]

Make a copy of the file first. Have you tried playing it in VLC player on a PC? That tries to fix simple errors in the file if it finds any.

Yeah, I tried VLC, didn't work. I Googled he problem and there's a lot of hits including videos. Haven't watched any but recoverit looks to be a great idea and I'm installing it right now. I'm thinking it can be easily fixed using Recoverit.

 

[Muse]

Well, already uninstalled Recoverit. It wouldn't fix the file without paying $40, AFAIK. One Reddit post said it infected his registry bigtime. I may have to reinstall Windows but I was intending to anyway...

 

[Muse]

I'm watching this ~8min. video showing how to recover a corrupted m4a audio file. I like it, I'm impressed, I'm optimistic using this technique will work. I won't know for sure until I try it, which I'll do right now. Will likely take me 1/2 an hour because I have to download a few things...

 

[Muse]

Didn't work in my case, I think the file is too corrupted to retrieve. Seems silly, but faad.exe couldn't decode my .m4a file. Got error: Channel coupling not implemented.

 

[TomVLes]

Hey Muse,

Did you repair the audio file? So far as I know, M4A is a container file, just like MP4, but only for the audio stream. I think, it can be fixed by repairing the damaged header. I could try and repair it, but I need a similar audio track recorded with the same device and settings. If you have one, you could upload them somewhere (e.g. Google Drive) and share the link with me.

 

[mirrored]

Hey Muse,

Did you repair the audio file? So far as I know, M4A is a container file, just like MP4, but only for the audio stream. I think, it can be fixed by repairing the damaged header. I could try and repair it, but I need a similar audio track recorded with the same device and settings. If you have one, you could upload them somewhere (e.g. Google Drive) and share the link with me.

I have a similar problem. Can you help me; if I send you the voice memo by google drive?

 

[charlie532811]

Hi, I have the same issue. Any one can help?

 

[mindless1]

^ See TomVLes post above, with another working audio track made on same device, same settings (you can even make a new one now), you can use a hex editor to copy the header from the working track onto the corrupt one. It won't get rid of any further corruption in the audio content but is the best bet to try first.