I have been using a Sony Walkman MP3 player to make voice recordings. I have been transcribing the data using Windows Media Player which I mistakenly thought stored the recordings on the programme. On that basis I had not saved them as document files on my PC.

Today I accidentally erased the recordings from the MP3 player and also have recorded something onto it. This is when I discovered that Windows Media Player has not stored them as I had believed.

Can anyone tell me if there is any prospect that the recordings might be retrievable in any way from the MP3 player - or are they lost forever?

Normally when things are deleted they're not physically removed but their disk space allocated to be used by something else so until that space has been overwritten whatever was deleted will still be there. So as long as what you recorded wasn't in the space used you should be able to get it back with disk recovery software.

Thanks for your reply - that was my understanding of how it works. I have just tried a free demo of a disk recovery software package - but it doesn't even seem to recognise the Walkman - so I don't know if the files have been overwritten or not.

I'm not willing to purchase software if I can't even use the demo.

Is the walkman normally recognised as an additional hard drive on your PC?

Or is one of the Sonys that you can only "get at" through syncing software of some description?

If it's the former, and you can just browse the files on the walkman like you can those on your hard drive, you could give this:

http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file...htm?language=1

... a try. It's freeware and I've success using it before. BUT .... be careful with it! If you start randomly clicking stuff you're not sure about, it is possible to damage healthly files with software like this. As long as you're careful, you'll be fine.

But .... if it's the latter, you're going to have a hard time getting anything from it.