DP from 2001 Sound Designer II audio files

[Kenny B]

I was trying to open a really old project from November of 2001 and I was not able to open the project because the audio files are SDII files. Just wondering how this could happen and if there is a work around to allow me to open the project. There are a ton more projects that will not open and (from like 2017) and I fear it is the same issue.

[James Steele]

There was another topic someone posted about this on here. Might do a search. If you're running into this, the problem might be that you at some point stored your projects in an unzipped state on media that was not formatted for Macintosh, causing you to lose the resource fork of the Sound Designer 2 files and thus header information. I think there are some utilities that may enable you to rebuild the header so you can then import them into DP. Hopefully others who have been through this will chime in.

[stubbsonic]

If try to open old projects-- ones that were moved around (without zipping them first), as James said, the resource forks are missing so DP can't load them correctly. And you can and should try to find some way to edit the header so that DP can load the audio in the right places.

Failing that, the worst case scenario is that there are audio editors that can take headerless SDII files and convert them to something usable. The trouble is that the time stamp (or DP's ability to place in the correct location in the track) will be lost. So you might have to manually move audio bits to the track. And if you weren't organized you might have multiple takes to sort through.

My take-away from my various adventures is that before I archive a project, I make sure everything is labeled. All tracks are merged starting from time-zero, and all unused audio is either deleted or labeled as such.