More about recovering files

Despite there being several sound recording applications, very few of them (actually just one) can sync with a desktop computer. A recently available phone app called “Dictaphone” has such a facility, but the quality of the recordings are fixed at a low 8 kbps. Newpea’s Audio Recorder supports several levels of compression up to full CD quality but has no means at all of exporting the files.

So a way of recovering the sound files from the iTunes backup is still the only way to get them.

How-to

(_) Make a copy of the backup directory and change the name to something simple
(_) Copy the backup to a suitable location
(_) Copy the python script “decode_iphone_backup_v2.1.py” to the level above this location
(_) Use the Terminal application to run the script
(_) ./decode_iphone_backup_v2.1.py {backupfoldername}/*

The script will create a new folder at the same level called “MobileSyncExport” containing the expanded files in the original iPhone directory tree structure. Unfortunately the script cannot cope with a large number of files, so I sort the thousands of files in the backup into size order and cut it off at 1 MB. This reduces the list considerably. Audio files are typically larger so will remain in the reduced list.

Hopefully future updates to all of these programs will include a more practical means of syncing the files. This current method works, but at times just making a iPhone backup can take ages.