How to restore a voice recording in Whatsapp that was stopped due to application crash?

[Android Central Question]

Hi,
My friend used Whatsapp voice recorder to record a long interview.
After approximately one hour jumped a "low battery" notification that caused the application to crash.
We couldn't find the recording anywhere - not through the application or the *,opus file in: Internal Storage -> Whatsapp -> Media -> Whatsapp Voice Notes.

Any help would be appreciated.

Amit

 

[SpookDroid]

Unfortunately the temporary file created is likely gone. If Whatsapp crashed during the recording, the file wasn't saved and the temp file (if available) is only readable by the recorder itself, which doesn't have a way to just open those.

You can try to see which file in the Whatsapp data folder (probably will have to use a File Manager that supports showing hidden files or a computer) was created at the date/time you started/lost the recording and changing the file to a WAV or MP4 format and see if that works, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up

 

[B. Diddy]

I moved this to the WhatsApp forum for more specific traffic.

 

[Rukbat]

You can't "change the file to a WAV or MP4 format", all you can do is change the file extension - if it's not in a sound format, that will really make the file unusable. (Changing, say, an .ogg file - named myfile.ogg - to myfile.wav doesn't change it to a .wav file, it makes the phone think it's .wav file, and open it as a .wav file, then tell you that the file is corrupted. It is corrupted for a .wav file - it's an .ogg file.) If you can determine the type of file it is (and that would require a hex editor, to actually look at the data in the file - an .ogg file starts with OggS, a .wav file stars with RIFF, an MP3 file starts with the hex values ff fb 90 64), and the beginning of it is intact (if you see those values, it is), you can name it what it is. But if it's some proprietary format, there's nothing you can do with it.

And that's assuming that you can find it - it may be in /data/data/whatsapp, which you can't get to unless you root the phone.

 

[SpookDroid]

You can't "change the file to a WAV or MP4 format", all you can do is change the file extension - if it's not in a sound format, that will really make the file unusable. (Changing, say, an .ogg file - named myfile.ogg - to myfile.wav doesn't change it to a .wav file, it makes the phone think it's .wav file, and open it as a .wav file, then tell you that the file is corrupted.

That's what I meant. Sorry, poor choice of words.