Anyway to fix overwritten resource forks?

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Anyway to fix overwritten resource forks?

This might seem long winded to anyone not involved with audio, but it explains the situation, the question is really about some corrupted files.

I am having some troubles with a couple sound designer 2 files that will not work anymore. Let me explain the whole scenario:

I did a location recording using Digital Performer and 2 Motu 896HD's. The hard drive was then given to the guy who was supposed to mix the recording. He uses Nuendo 3 on Windows XP.

Now Digital Performer 4.6 records by default in SD2 format, which is supposed to be supported by Nuendo 3. But the guy gets the hard drive and his computer and Nuendo will not recognize or import the SD2 files.

So he renames a couple files and adds the .sd2 extension to them, which gives them quicktime icons, but he keeps getting end of file exceptions when trying to import or play them.

So I tell him not to worry about it, give me the hard drive back and I will export them to WAV files or whatever he wants. But the problem is I now have the hard drive, and I cant use the files he renamed anymore either! I've tried removing the extension, tried to import into Logic 7, and DP on my laptop, all with no luck. I've even tried a few converter programs.

The error I keep getting is:

Mac OS Error: The resource was not found. (-192)

Now I don't know much in this area, but it sounds like the header info or resource forks for the file got overwritten by Windows when the guy added the extension. Is there any way to fix this?

Is there a tool or anything to fix this? What can I do?

Any help is very appreciated, these are important files.

Thanks

Powerbook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.3), 1.25 AlBook

Posted on Dec 12, 2005 10:22 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 12, 2005 1:23 PM in response to Camron

Camron,

Are you positive that the files are Sound Designer II files? Is it possible they could be AIFF or WAV format? I would try adding the extension .aif to the file name and if that doesn't work, try .wav. Windows computers don't care about resource forks, so they should just ignore them. But Windows computers do need the file extension(which you should always include on your files if you are sharing files with non Mac platforms). I've encountered this problem before when people have ftp'd files to me without the extension. Even though we are both on OS X, ftp servers are not resource fork aware. So unless the extension is included with the name, OS X has no idea what the filetype is.

Grant

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Answer 2

Dec 12, 2005 2:20 PM in response to Grant Greene

Hey Camron,

Upon further searching, it looks like that SDII files have to have the resource fork info. Newer formats like AIFF and WAV don't need the resource fork. If the resource data is not there or is corrupted, you will have to try some tricks to get them to work.

This is from the Cycling '74 website:

# Why won't my SDII files work?
SD2 files are inherently a Macintosh only format (resource based header).They will never work directly in Max/MSP. They will need to be converted first into something else (WAV, AIFF). However, if you were to transfer SD2 files to the PC and knew the sampling rate/bit depth/number of channels, you could open the raw file and make use of the force header calls to play back the file. The data byte offset would be zero, as the data fork contains only audio data.

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Answer 3

Camron Author

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Dec 30, 2005 9:56 AM in response to Camron

Sound Forge 8 for Windows was able to load the raw audio data and force the headers and then export as .wav

Thanks to all for suggestions.

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