Is It Possible To Reconstruct Missing RIFF headers with Notepad++?

Question

my name is Annabelle. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this request, but here goes. I am a sight challenged woman who is a sound designer, and I'm having trouble with making a specific .wav file play in Windows Media Player, Audacity, or even Sonar 8.5 Producer Edition. I'm trying to fix a .wav file that I recently recovered, and the data is there, but the RIFF header is missing. I'm reading this with Notepad++, which I'm not sure if that makes sense to you. Usually, there's a section at the beginning of a wave file that says something like: RIFFø ß WAVEfmt D¬ Ì JUNKÊ data øÞ ¿ Ä | [ 0 Æ j r Ú µ \ / î } ¥ [ L ‡ ¦ û ] î - t X Ð [ G ù / p æ U } B i F b

• á · P “ K w é F y ² ç 9 8 ž ¤ e ž Ž b Ó Þ Ô ß p ­ : Î ' Ý $ x w ' í ( n ù À Z • ­ Û ˜ tÿÿaÿÿOýÿüÿmüÿôûÿ÷ûÿ7ýÿ3ÿÿÁýÿ þÿ üÿ ýÿ›ûÿ¡úÿñùÿ%øÿ}÷ÿ<øÿ·õÿÑôÿ½õÿ ôÿ"ôÿ(óÿLóÿsñÿ¡óÿ<öÿÖõÿôÿ‡öÿNöÿVõÿÕóÿ\õÿ õÿóóÿ8òÿZôÿXóÿ€òÿ°óÿ•òÿ^ñÿþóÿ½óÿ(ôÿæôÿœõÿ öÿ:÷ÿ ÷ÿùÿõøÿ»ùÿ¦øÿ=øÿ’úÿì÷ÿ4øÿ ùÿÆöÿ øÿDùÿÿ÷ÿÅùÿÙøÿ"úÿDùÿdøÿ¹øÿ ÷ÿ—ôÿ…öÿ•÷ÿò÷ÿ¤õÿùÿ øÿ²ùÿŠûÿ.þÿüÿÿ ÿÿ xÿÿi Ë k ô $ Á ’þÿ &ÿÿ cÿÿåþÿ·ûÿÌûÿÏüÿ%þÿýÿ…üÿ:þÿ¦ÿÿ¢ÿÿ€þÿÜþÿ<ÿÿžÿÿyýÿJýÿ-ÿÿ Zþÿ | A ÕþÿÞþÿ-ÿÿ i ˜ÿÿ» . g ì Ä º | 4 š W S i I'm not sure which part is the header and which part is the data, as there's a bunch of foreign characters in this chunk that I've pasted. Is there a way for me to send the full .wav file as an attachment so I can show you what I mean? What I'm trying to do is reconstruct the recovered .wav file so it will play. I tried Import raw data within Audacity, but it gave me a whole lotta nothin'. If I try opening it with Sonar, it says the file may be damaged. If I open it with Windows Media Player, it says the file is either corrupt or the codec used to compress the file is not supported. This doesn't make sense, since all .wav files, especially "RIFF wave" files are uncompressed, right? What shall I do next? What I do know about this file is, the length of the song is 4 minutes, 25 seconds, it was made as a RIFF wave file, the bite order is supposed to be Little Endian, the Bits Per Sample is 24, the number of channels is 1, the bitrate is 1058KBPS Constant, which is also rendered as 1059KBPS in another section, the codec ID is 1, and the sample rate is 44,100 KHZ.

Answer 1

As it seems you know all the parameters which are necessary to read the raw audio data, my suggestion would be :

• Open a copy (to prevent any involuntary destruction of the original file) of the corrupted file with an hexadecimal editor (a text editor that shows raw bytes and their value in common encodings)

• Locate the 'data' string (it is '64 61 74 61' in hexadecimal)

• Remove all bytes from beginning of the file to the 'data' part (including the 'data' string) plus the four next bytes. For example, it might look like '....64 61 74 61 0A 0B 0C 0D', you should remove all bytes up to '0D' included.

• Save as raw data

• Launch an audio editor (audacity for example) that is able to read raw audio data

• Open the edited file as raw audio, filling the appropriate fields with the value you know (sampling frequency, samples size, byte order, number of channels)

• Your file should be readable in the audio editor

• Save/Export the file as wav from within the audio editor to produce a wav file with correct header

It seems that to use notepad++ as an hex editor, you need to install a plugin. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60641199/use-notepad-as-hex-editor

Also notice that wav files can contain non-pcm audio data, in which case this procedure will fail.