Logic corrupting song packages and audio files

Hello Gents, I'm having a bit of a headache that I need some help with.

The problem:

I have 6 songs I'm recording for a friend. We recorded the latest round of vocals a few days ago. Everything went well at the time. I was editing one of the songs yesterday, no problem. I open them today and I'm running into a huge problem.

Most of the projects won't open, giving one of the following errors:

The data couldn’t be read because it isn’t in the correct format.

The operation could not be completed.

On top of that, All the takes we recorded have been corrupted or changed to be either 1 second long (131kb) or 0kb and unable to play. In every single project.

What I've tried so far:

Now I'm a pretty savvy computer dude, so I've tried a few things. I checked for the @0 disease. I copied the packages to my desktop to try and open them from there. I searched through the packages and tried opening autosaves, including replacing the ProjectData file with one from the backups folder. I option-clicked them to open from an autosave using the logic dialog.

I searched for a way to edit the file properties of the AIFs, hoping they were truncated only in the reference portion of the file (and not actually edited destructively and saved). Couldn't find a way to do that.

Things to note:

I started them in Studio One, but had to bounce the files over to Logic. I have 6 packages, one for each song. Everything for these songs are on my Samsung solid state external HD. I'm using an MBox mini 3rd gen (USB). You can see my computer specs in my signature. I'm also running boot camp with Windows 10 from my internal HD.

I started using Melodyne on the last song (the only one I started editing), and that ended up saving some of the audio files when this weird thing hit. Because it imported into melodyne correctly, melodyne saved its own version, and then the source files got corrupted. Make sense?

Because I bounced and imported from Studio One, many of the songs have extra folders lying around. It hasn't been a problem so far.

A shot of the only file that will open.

So um... help? How can I recover these projects and audio files?. Thank you

To clarify:

Where did you record all those tracks? In Studio One on the Windows partition?

Melodyne is in Logic or Studio One?

Hi triplets,

All of the tracks are on the external hard drive. Most of them were recorded by Studio One via OSX. Some were recorded in Logic, and the most recent audio files that are now unusable were recorded via Logic to the hard drive.

Melodyne is in Logic as a plug-in. I didn't use it on all the channels that are unusable or even all the projects, so I don't think it's a straight correlation that it would have corrupted the projects...

Tough one, eh?

Dumb question:

All of your drives are formatted in Mac OSX Extended?

Hi Triplets,

Had a busy few weeks, now getting back into the swing of things. The external drive is formatted in ExFAT. My OS drive is formatted in Mac OSX Extended.

Update: I ran some pretty intense data recovery to try to get the files, but most of them are still unusable. And I wasn't able to find a program that recovered previous versions of existing files so I will have to start from scratch with the mixes. Not ideal, but at least the rest of the audio files are still there.

Yeah, Logic doesn't like Fat32 or ExFat drives at all, capable of rendering files useless.

Always use Mac OSX Extended drives when recording with Logic.

Good to know :/ Strange that it was working flawlessly for so long.

 

Late last night I had a small breakthrough. I replaced the projectinformation.plist from a new Logic project into the corrupt projects, and was able to open the project files again! I saved them on my internal drive in a new project to try to avoid this problem.

 

Most of the audio files I recovered are still unusable, corrupt, or too short. Oh well, we'll have to re-record.

 

I guess we can consider this resolved, kinda.

This post just saved me such a huge headache. I have a corrupted/unmountable Lacie Rugged USB 3 Drive and it just stopped working a few days ago. After countless attempts at data recovery I still could not open the Logic files even after they were successfully recovered. After copying the ProjectInformation.plist in the "Package Contents->Resources" of a new session folder into the existing sessions that would not open, this fixed it immediately. Thank you for sharing!

I'm in Logic X 10.5.1 with OS Catalina 10.15.16

Hey Matt!

Wow good to hear that fix helped you. I've never attempted this myself. Sorry to hear about the drive going bad.