Hi,

I did the rather foolish thing of formatting the wrong partition. I had a backup of most of the important data, but not my MP3s. It was a pretty large collection I had gathered from the library, friends and so on, so it would be rather troublesome to recover it.

I tried some disc recovery utilities for mac, but they didn't work. Luckily, I had transfered them from one disk to another not long before, so I believe each file should be on the disk in one consecutive bit stream. (Why, oh why didn't I keep the backup?) This means it should be possible to write a program to extract them from the disk.

So I ask you, is there a way I can recognise an MP3 in a stream of random data? Is there a header that starts it? A sequence which occurs frequently in it? A sequence to signify the end? I thought of reading the specification (if I could find it) but I guess it would be mostly about decoding, and I figured the MP3 gurus here could help me understand what a "real world" mp3 looks like.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and, needless to say, any code I write as a result of this will be released to the public

I don't have any idea on how to recognize mp3 data.. but you might want some useful tools for PC data recovery (as I did the exact same recently losing 8gb of home-recorded mp3s...)

I'll provide the links in PM, I don't remember which are shareware and which .. uh .. a friend gave me

Thank you, but no thank you. First of all, I have a mac, so PC utilities won't do me much good. Second, according to the Ministry of Culture, copying borrowed CDs is legal here, so I'm not encouraging piracy.