Calistan Solutions Wave Safe

If a corrupted file is detected, you can start the salvage procedure by clicking on the Review/Fix button. Here the smaller central window shows a salvage operation in progress.

If you have ever been faced with an error message that prevented you loading in an entire track of WAV audio, you will be extremely interested in Wave Safe. Martin Walker explores a world of corruption.

Utility programs tend to appear a little bit boring, until you need the function they provide, at which point they become invaluable. Wave Safe is one such program. The potential problem is that any file stored on your hard disk runs the risk of being corrupted, whether due to a glitch when recording, or subsequently when an out‑of‑control application allows a hard disk write somewhere in the middle of one of your precious audio files. Taking backups is essential, but it's always tempting to leave them until another day, and even backups can sometimes become corrupted as well.

The Problem

There are two main types of file corruption from an audio point of view. Corruption can, of course, occur in the actual audio data itself, but the most annoying problem is when the header area of an audio file gets corrupted. When this happens, you simply get an error message from Sound Forge, Cubase, Cakewalk, Logic Audio, and so on, informing you that there is an error, and the entire file refuses to load. Being able to salvage the entire file is not an option without Wave Safe unless you have access to an advanced byte‑level editor, and know exactly what you are doing.

The Solution

Wave Safe safeguards your audio files by monitoring and reporting on any degradation since the last time you protected them. If it finds any problems, it will produce a salvaged version, and will even attempt to rescue sound files from any damaged media such as chewed‑up backup tapes, scratched CD‑Rs and so on.

The protection process is fairly simple. Once you have installed the Wave Safe program you enter a small window with four tabs. The one labelled Setup allows you to select the protection level (more on this in a moment) and to select the paths that your audio files inhabit. Having done this, you then select the 'All Files' tab, and click on the 'Protect' button. You would normally do this just before making a backup. Once all files have been analysed, a database is created with all the details, against which the files can be checked at any time — most likely when you next reload from the backup — by clicking on 'Check'.

Calistan suggest creating a new database for each major project, and the 'Database' tab takes you to another window, so that you can perform routine maintenance on these. The fourth tab allows you to check and protect Individual Files.

On The Level

There are three levels of protection to choose from. 'Basic' is quickest to run and produces a tiny database, but only stores information about the structure of the file, to allow you to read a file that gets its header corrupted. The 'Regular' option adds protection against audio data loss, which can cause bad timing due to missing sections, or bad alignment, which may cause all data after the problem to be garbled and unlistenable. It takes longer to run than Basic protection and produces a significantly larger database, but is a more secure way to work. The 'Thorough' option analyses the files during protection much more thoroughly (and therefore slowly), so that running a Check will discover even tiny areas of the audio data that have been corrupted, often with no obvious audible results. Whilst non‑audible corruption would initially seem not to matter, it is a sign that something has gone wrong, so it is always better to discover this at an early stage.

Damage Limitation

If Wave Safe finds that a file has been corrupted, you can click on the 'Fix/Review' button to try to repair it. Wave Safe then goes through a regime of examining, diagnosing, tracking lost data and refreshing, before creating a salvaged version of the damaged file in a separate directory. It then creates a Corruption/Salvage report of what it found, and what exactly it managed to repair: the reports for a single file may extend to several pages of technical data. These detail every error that Wave Safe has corrected, with a few lines at the end with details of any bad areas that remain. These are often the only bits that you really need to study, as the program is not designed to fill in corrupted areas of sound files — to do this you need to load the salvaged file into an editor like Sound Forge or Wavelab. Actually repairing extensive damage in such an editor is still a skilled operation, but the fact that Wave Safe has already reported the location of any damaged areas greatly speeds up the procedure, though unfortunately there's no option to place markers either side of possibly corrupted sections to make them obvious when loaded into an editor.

Conclusions

Although unexciting, this type of protection can save the day after an unrepeatable take gets accidentally trashed, and I suspect that loads of shareware versions will be downloaded and subsequently registered. The Pro version offers several additional options if you backup to other media such as removable drives and CD‑R, and is also well worth considering. I sincerely hope that your data doesn't get corrupted, but if this does happen Wave Safe is a valuable tool that can minimise the damage. Try it out for yourself.