ANALYSIS FORENSIC AUDIO

Audio File Inspector

Drop in a WAV or MP3 file. For WAV: walks the real RIFF chunk structure and compares declared sizes against actual file size to catch truncation. For MP3: validates MPEG frame sync across the file and reads ID3v1/ID3v2 tags. FLAC and OGG are identified but not deeply inspected yet.

File

Common error messages this diagnoses

If you're here because something threw one of these, this tool shows you exactly what's wrong and how much is recoverable:

  • "This file is not a supported audio format" — generic player failure — this tool checks the real container structure underneath.
  • "audio file is corrupted" — this tool distinguishes a truncated file from a genuinely malformed one.
  • "invalid WAV header" — the RIFF/WAVE structure itself failed a check.

What this tool doesn't do

This inspects container/header structure, not the audio payload — it can't tell you whether the encoded samples themselves are corrupt or whether a WAV/MP3 will actually sound right, only whether the file's declared structure matches what's really there. FLAC and OGG files are identified by their magic bytes ("fLaC" / "OggS") but not deeply walked — no metadata block or Ogg page parsing yet. MP3 frame-sync scanning checks that consecutive frame headers chain together correctly (a strong corruption signal) but doesn't decode any audio data, and variable bitrate (VBR) files are supported since each frame's bitrate is read independently. ID3v2 tag reading covers the common text frames (title, artist, album, year, track, genre) in ID3v2.2/2.3/2.4, not the full frame spec (no embedded album art, lyrics, or custom frames). WAV extensible format (WAVE_FORMAT_EXTENSIBLE) is recognized but its extra fields aren't decoded in detail.