Extracting files from unknown, obsolete formats.

[Shooshie]

I've recently been using DP for a non-musical project: collecting interviews with family members, recording their voices, and creating an archive of recordings of the people I know and love. Trouble is, some of those recordings are pretty old, digitally speaking, of course. When the Mac first became able to record through a microphone -- you could record a few seconds into the system alert sounds, creating your own "alert" instead of the beeps and squawks that were always included--I had recorded my children's voices, and they found that to be very entertaining. Periodically we'd record other things as it became possible to do so. Some of those audio files are in now-extinct formats. In fact, some of them show up in UNIX executables now. Others are just a blank "page" icon for an unrecognized audio format. I knew that all of those old files had audio in them, but how could I get to it?

Then I remembered a remarkable tool that I'd bought about 5 years ago for Sim City Rush Hour. There were all kinds of wonderful mods for Sim City Rush Hour, but there was only one drawback. Maxis had only released their modeler for the PC. When you downloaded mod files, they came in a .exe package. Same problem; how to extract the cool "building" from inside the .exe file?

That's when I found File Juicer. A file is like an orange, it says, and beneath the peel is the good stuff, so the juicer goes in and looks for data it recognizes, "squeezes" it out, and saves it as a file. Some files might yield hundreds of little files, which File Juicer neatly arranges in folders labeled text, pict, audio, video. URLs, etc. When it's done, the original file remains intact, of course, but its copied contents have become like a box of parts. They're just loose files now.

I was able to extract the audio from every single file I ran through the File Juicer. I selected all the sound files and dragged them into DP. Then I had a permanent record of all those little things we used to make when the kids were little. Very nice.

Also, for anyone who is looking for a meaningful way to make sense of archived files, I use a utility called DiskTracker which has been around for ages. Seriously, this thing started back in the Classic Mac days, and it has changed very little. It's been updated for Snow Leopard, but that's about it. If you can get past the look and the fact that it operates like a Classic Mac app, this is the fastest, easiest, best (for me) disk cataloging utility that I've tried so far. Back in about 2004 I archived to DVD what amounted to my computer life up to that point - everything since 1984 that had ever made it to hard disk, and some from floppies as well. I ran them through DiskTracker to catalog them.

Before I did this (2004), I downloaded every file cataloguer known to Version Tracker and tried them all. Some were nice apps with all kinds of features that I couldn't even figure out. I just wanted to catalog my files. I didn't want to bake each one of them a cake and offer it a cappuccino; I just wanted a quick and dirty list, organized like the Finder. And fast. Some apps took forever to catalog one disk. DiskTracker spits them right out. It gathers the contents in no time at all. Plus, it was cheap at $30. (File Juicer is $17.95)

When I need to find old files that would not likely be on any of my active hard drives, I turn to my DiskTracker archive and look up my file. In a few seconds it will tell me exactly where to go to find it. Then I look in my little "tower" of DVD's, and there's my disk. Insert it, and DiskTracker takes over to bring up the file. Quite often I run into the problem of obsolete filetypes, thus File Juicer.

I couldn't have done my little project without DiskTracker and File Juicer. Since I come upon a LOT of situations which these two apps get me through quickly, I thought I'd share them with you. They're first-rate in performance, even if neither is necessarily great to look at.

Shooshie

[richardein]

Two great tips, Shooshie. In re: File Juicer, I'm not sure what I'll use it for. I have all these old Studio Vision files on Mac, and Texture 2 files on PC that I'd love to gain access to, but I doubt it could recover the data in a usable format like MIDI file. I'll play around with it tho. And thanks again!

r

[Shooshie]

You gave me the idea of trying it on old Performer files, but it got nothing. I was curious if it might extract a standard MIDI file or something, but no such luck. Anyway, I can still open Performer files from 1987, so that's not a problem. But it would be nice if it could find the MIDI in old Vision files. I don't think MIDI is on its list, unfortunately. Maybe if we asked...

Shooshie

[bongo_x]

File Juicer is pretty great. I mentioned it on a thread about internet caches, you can use it to save videos and music etc. from your browser's cache.

bb