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.

I use Adobe Audition aka CE pro rather than CE 2000 but I assume
that there aren't much differences here...
This is pretty much normal for the temporary file that CE uses when
_editing_ a recording. CE saves pointers to the parts of the file
while working on it.

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. 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.

When you restarted the computer, CE normally should detect an existing
temporary file and then ask whether you want to continue now, later
or never. When you decide to continue now and the save the work the
temporary file gets sorted while copying to the place you name for
saving.

Does anyone know any arcane tricks for recovering the raw temp files
from Cool Edit 2000?

Maybe you should put CE into the state it was in while the system
crashed. Unfortunately I don't know how to get there.

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? Will a computer crash always cause something like this, even when
the beginning of the file should have been all right? Or is this
strange time warp stuff not even related to the crash?

A long time ago while using CoolEdit95 I had a similar "unsorted"
file when the disk filled up and more and more space fragments got
used. At that time I thought that CE95 tried to minimize movements
of the mechanics during time critical jobs and sorted the file at
the time of saving. Maybe this holds still today and you suffered
from disk fragmentation, system crash and not continuing the session.

Sorry for not having better news,
Norbert