Nightmare scenario - Any way to recover a corrupted project?

Wurlitzer

New member
Damn.

Four solid day's work on this song, and I mean SOLID days (and nights).

Somehow, in the heat of inspiration, I didn't get round to making a backup.

Today I had one of those days when everything went wrong with my 'puter. Its all OK now, but when I try to open this project file, I get a very terse little message that says "General Error", with a box I can click to close without opening the file, and no other option.

I have tried the Safe Mode thing - pressing shift while opening. Even if I choose not to load any plugins at all, I still get the same message.

The file starts loading, then when the bar at the bottom says 9% - bang! "General Error".

I know its the file and not Sonar, 'cause I did a DriveImage restore to a known good installation. Sonar works fine with all my other files - just this one won't open.

The manual doesn't help. It only mentions using the shift key and not loading plugins. As I said I've already tried that.

The file was almost entirely MIDI - detailed, painstakingly crafted MIDI - so I can't even reconstruct it by re-importing the audio files.

So, does anybody know a way of getting into a file like this? I suspect its screwed, but I thought I may as well try.

Please don't lecture me about the importance of backing up, or I'll firebomb your house.


I'm going downstairs to gas myself now.
 
Wurlitzer said:
The file was almost entirely MIDI - detailed, painstakingly crafted MIDI - so I can't even reconstruct it by re-importing the audio files.
This could be an extreme long shot, but I think I've read somewhere that you could rename that file to ".mid" instead of ".cwp" and the MIDI-information would reveal itself. Of course all othe settings would be lost (as in/output settings, DXis, etc...), but it's worth a try.

Just remember make a backup of the file.
 
Thanks for trying, but no dice.

The file still won't open as a MIDI file - I get the same error. I even tried opening it in Sibelius, and importing it into Cubase. They wouldn't touch it either.

Ho hum.
 
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