"Old Analog Guy" wrote ...
I've recorded an air check that's behaving oddly. It's
recorded in Cool Edit 2000 and the problem., as best I can
describe it, is that the audio isn't in sequence. It goes along
normally for a few seconds and then I hear some audio that's
sort of "from the future," after a couple of more seconds of
ordinary audio I get a gap, which is where the "audio from
the future" came from.

It's as if a gremlin has edited random sections and placed
them a few seconds earlier in the file. If you're listening to
it it sounds like, "And now we {Texas} go to Joe Blow in
{} for that story." Where the part in curly braces is placed
in an earlier part of the file. This happens hundreds or thousands
of times in a 5 hour air check.

Now the computer crashed during the air check. But the
crash happened at the end of the recording. And the problem
starts at the very beginning of the recording, hours before the
crash. As a consequence of the crash the file was never saved.

Since files are recorded sector-by-sector in whatever empty
space can be found at the moment of writing, it seems very
probable that your file is not only fragmented by location, but
the sequence of the sectors is scrambled. You are lucky that
you have anything at all. Of course you can re-assemble the
out-of-sequence pieces if it is worth the effort.

Why did the computer crash in the middle of the recording?
You weren't using it for something else concurrently? Note
also that if you are recording long sequences, it is better to
cut them off after a period (30 or 60 minutes at least) to
avoid exactly the kind of problem you are seeing. Many of
us would also use a de-fragmented, dedicated drive to write
such long-form recordings.

I know that Cool Edit 2000 records a temporary file in
something like "raw" format and I've been trying to recover
from that, but I always get this odd time warp stuff.

What I did was go in after the crash and rename the big temp
file that Cool Edit 2000 had made. Then I've been trying to
open this file.

Does anyone know any arcane tricks for recovering the raw
temp files from Cool Edit 2000? Is my problem that I'm just
not recovering the file in the correct format or is this likely
just how the audio is now?

The problem appears that you are not recovering the file in
the right sequence. When the recovery routine goes in and
identifies the apparently orphan sectors, there is no record of
what order they were used (until the file is properly closed).

Will a computer crash always cause something like this,

If the computer really "crashed" I think you are extraordinarly
lucky to have recovered what you have. I would expect to lose
everything in an open file (including ongoing recordings).

even when the beginning of the file should have been all right?

A file is never really properly saved until it is closed. That
is how modern computer operating systems work to optimize
disk space.

Or is this strange time warp stuff not even related to the crash?

I believe you are correct in thinking that the scrambled file was
caused by the crash.

Airchecking on Scullys was never like this!

Scullys (and Ampexes, et. al.) were 1000x less complex than
the cheapest computer and did only one thing at a time.