Please help me salvage recorded MP3 that seems to have been corrupted, [TOS #6: was “Help with file playback issue” in General Audio] Options

[kwdelre]

Hello everyone,

I really need some help here. I recorded a meeting using a MemoQ Pen Recorder MQ-94. It records in MP3 format and has worked in the past. Well, after the meeting I went to download it from the flash drive and the file will not playback on anything. (I've tried all I can on both windos and Mac) The file itself appears to have recorded because it is a 17 mb file, so I know it wrote something. There is clearly an issue with the recorder itself since it used to work fine, but what I need to do is try to recover this file.

When attempting to open the file on a Mac it does nothing. On windows it gives me a general playback error as if it didn't recognize the codec.
The only program I was able to get the file to even open in was Audacity. In Audacity the file appears as a 1.5 sec clip and when I play it, it sounds like the entire hour long meeting in a second.

I tried two programs to repair the file without any luck. (All Media Fixer, and MP3 Repair Tool)

I can't figure out anything else to try at this point to recover this file. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Will

[splice]

From looking at the sketchy info online, it looks like my guess about the header format is correct.
The MQ-94 is a 4 GB device with a recording time of 284 hours. That's almost exactly 32K bitrate.
The frame size is 288 bytes for MPEG 2.5 Layer III 32K bitrate 8 KHz sample rate, too.

Will,
Have you successfully played recordings made with this device before?
We really need a piece of the original file - preferably the first 512K bytes or so. You should be able to put it in the uploads thread, I'll leave it for someone else to advise you because I've never done it. There are various free utilities around which allow cutting a section out of a file.

Edit: Try HJSplit (http://www.hjsplit.org)
Specify 512 KB as the split size. It will generate a set of output files ending in .001, .002, .003 etc. Just upload the one ending in .001.

General question for the peanut gallery:
Does WMP support MPEG 2.5? Does Foobar2000?

This post has been edited by splice: Jan 11 2013, 13:46

[Dynamic]

Does WMP support MPEG 2.5? Does Foobar2000?

I'm sure fb2k always has in the past. Not tested it lately or ever tested WMP.