You can always contact product support for such cases where Reason thinks your saved document is corrupted. Usually the cause is not Reason, but hard disk file integrity, USB-disk detached before OS completed writing and such things. If Reason was part of the cause, it can be repaired. The recorded audio data in audio clips is plain and can be recovered even if the song data is broken. The song data in the document files is specific to Reason, and can only be interpreted by using a working Reason-license, which is a major part of the DRM/licensing-system for Reason, yes. If you have any issue with the song data in any document file, we will help as I mentioned. Ok here's a workaround for a bad format error if it's RE related.

Simply delete the 'offending' RE that you're having trouble with, then reopen your track and you should get the cardboard rack insert instead for the missing REs if in use. At this point, save as a new track file (as long as opened ok).

Then close Reason. Go to your Props account and resync the REs. Once finished, open Reason and you should be able to open your salvaged track, and have the ability to add in the RE that was giving you headache. Short of that, if you can't find the RE that gave you headache, try deleting all REs, see if the track opens and if it does save as a really heavily salvaged project file, and gradually reintroduce REs to your machine, rebuilding the track at each stage.

A PITA agreed, but we found this helped out when an RE had a control changed / removed and a project file had an older version (broke reverse-compatibility). LABONERECORDINGS wrote:Ok here's a workaround for a bad format error if it's RE related. Simply delete the 'offending' RE that you're having trouble with, then reopen your track and you should get the cardboard rack insert instead for the missing REs if in use. At this point, save as a new track file (as long as opened ok). Then close Reason. Go to your Props account and resync the REs.

Once finished, open Reason and you should be able to open your salvaged track, and have the ability to add in the RE that was giving you headache. Short of that, if you can't find the RE that gave you headache, try deleting all REs, see if the track opens and if it does save as a really heavily salvaged project file, and gradually reintroduce REs to your machine, rebuilding the track at each stage. A PITA agreed, but we found this helped out when an RE had a control changed / removed and a project file had an older version (broke reverse-compatibility) Thanks! I'll try this later. Damasio wrote:Joooohhhh what is this shit?

I'm having it with a project i have been working on for weeks. When i try to open it, i get 'File has bad format' I have brand new macbook, this is UNACCEPTABLE!!!!! Have you check if there's maybe a beta version of a RE included in these songs. Happened to me a couple of times. I do hope the Props fix this because it shouldn't happen. Never had any song locked in Ableton over the years. Locked songs are show stoppers.

I guess a client would be furious if he would see me open such a file with an error. LABONERECORDINGS wrote:Ok here's a workaround for a bad format error if it's RE related. Simply delete the 'offending' RE that you're having trouble with, then reopen your track and you should get the cardboard rack insert instead for the missing REs if in use. At this point, save as a new track file (as long as opened ok). Then close Reason. Go to your Props account and resync the REs. Once finished, open Reason and you should be able to open your salvaged track, and have the ability to add in the RE that was giving you headache.

Short of that, if you can't find the RE that gave you headache, try deleting all REs, see if the track opens and if it does save as a really heavily salvaged project file, and gradually reintroduce REs to your machine, rebuilding the track at each stage. A PITA agreed, but we found this helped out when an RE had a control changed / removed and a project file had an older version (broke reverse-compatibility) Ok I tried this and it didn't work, unfortunately.

One of my songs gives a bad format error. I can understand that for the Props to change their file format is heavy but an unlock tool might be an idea. I do hope the Props fix this because it shouldn't happen. Never had any song locked in Ableton over the years. Locked songs are show stoppers. Does any one know why I get a bad format every time I try to open reason 5. Reason 5 - i get Bad format. Does anyone know how to fix this on a mac???

Marco Raaphorst wrote:Got a reply from support: 'I'm afraid that I can't open the file either. It is hard to say what could have happened to the file but if can occur if the saving process is interrupted in some way or if you store your files on an external drive and eject the drive in an unsafe way. Just to be sure you should always keep a back up of your importans sessions on a separate drive.' So fuck me, my file is dead.

Music gone!!!! Horrible when that happens. Reason should have some automated file integrity check. If you turn it on, every time it saves, the saved file is re-read and validated in the background.

I guess if the file hasn't actually been flushed to disk, and that migration is the problem - perhaps it can be forced to flush to disk (or is that an OS-only decision?). It occurred after i upgraded to reason 9.2, i don't do betatesting and deleting re's didn't help. The damage might be too large for me to stick with reason, i can't be creative with that anxiety of losing all that work over me. Maybe this is a sign to diversify my usage of daws. The loss of trust is huge.

Fotoba Digitrim Manual Dexterity. Its unforgivable that there is no backdoor, or save boot functionality built in to solve this. So one weird bug and thats it????

All the work gone??? All the music gone???? It's a bug in 9.2, PH is working on that bug as we are discussing this. Damasio wrote:It occurred after i upgraded to reason 9.2, i don't do beta testing and deleting re's didn't help. The damage might be too large for me to stick with reason, i can't be creative with that anxiety of losing all that work over me. Maybe this is a sign to diversify my usage of daws. The loss of trust is huge.

Its unforgivable that there is no backdoor, or save boot functionality built in to solve this. So one weird bug and thats it???? All the work gone??? All the music gone???? It's a bug in 9.2, PH is working on that bug as we are discussing this.!!!Thanks for the link!!!

I had two songs I was working on recently that started having this error. I'm scarred to work on anything else at the moment. I started working on some songs in Version 8 until they get this issue fixed. The one thing I like about switching between different DAWs is that it forces you do things differently, at least for me creating music that I would have never thought of in Reason. Reasons workflow in IMO is more intuitive than Studio one 3 and Bitwig but I love the different things they do. I've had a problem with a sample (including a Dr. Rex sample) no longer being able to save (and thus disappearing when the song is loaded again), l think it happened when my computer went into hibernation and awoke again.

It has happened twice now. I wish there was a history of file versions automatically generated in the scratch folder, which l could restore from. I might just change my hibernation settings but l'm a bit upset about the lack of automatic versioning. OK l don't know if it's normal to even have automatic versioning, but surely the program could check how much free disk space you got, or let you allocate a size for scratch folder, and based on that, it could fill it with a history of versions for at least until you shut down the computer. I haven't had any problems yet with 9.2 (fingers crossed) but good advice to avoid this kind of situation is to save the song file with a different name after any major revisions - I usually append the date to the end of the filename.

Also if you're on Windows you could try right clicking the reason file in explorer/my computer and choose properties from the context menu. When the dialog box pops up click the 'Previous Versions' tab. Depending on how your OS is set up you may find there are versions there that you can recover.

Lastly, if anyone has suffered anything similar and is working on a commercial basis that means they are prepared to spend money to recover data you can always go to a data recovery specialist although they probably wouldn't be that much help with the specific situations above. I'm a Digital Forensic Analyst which is like data recovery on steroids - I can't do stuff for free as I really don't have time but if anyone is absolutely desperate I'm contactable through this forum. Cheers Aiden.

I don't know what to say other than possibly re-install it after a clean uninstall? See, this is exactly what I meant when I said that the stability of the program would decrease as time went on, thereby eroding the argument that VST integration would harm the stability of the platform.

Almost always, whenever an application goes to an auto-update scheme of improving/optimizing code, things like this start cropping up. It is very possible that if you are on R8+, an auto-update in the background failed to complete and corrupted a file that was important to the install. If you're on 7.x, who knows. I just had the exact same thing happen to me.

Turned out to be a bad RE (Pulsar Dual LFO). Reason would open fine with it uninstalled, but would have the Bad Format error whenever it was installed. Props suggested my antivirus was being a douche and falsely quarantining the Pulsar dll file, and suggested disabling it while downloading Pulsar again. All working good again. So try uninstalling your REs one by one until Reason opens again.

Then disable your antivirus and re-download the REs you removed. That fixed it for me. You could also add an exception to the%appdata% Roaming Propellerhead Software RackExtensions directory in your antivirus for future use. Aquila wrote:I just had the exact same thing happen to me.

Turned out to be a bad RE (Pulsar Dual LFO). This just happened to me yesterday. Avast suddenly declared the Pulsar RE dll as malware/virus and Reason 8.2 could not be opened. After deleting Pulsar in Authorizer & making the Pulsar dll as exception in the Avast preferences I pressed the 'SYNC ALL' button & everything worked fine again. Btw: Something strange happened - because after starting Reason the (big & incredible good) TSAR-1 Reverb (which I did not buy) appeared in my RE Folder. Maybe it has to do with the Outboard bundle that I purchased some months ago. Aquila wrote:I just had the exact same thing happen to me.

Turned out to be a bad RE (Pulsar Dual LFO). Reason would open fine with it uninstalled, but would have the Bad Format error whenever it was installed. Props suggested my antivirus was being a douche and falsely quarantining the Pulsar dll file, and suggested disabling it while downloading Pulsar again. All working good again.

So try uninstalling your REs one by one until Reason opens again. Then disable your antivirus and re-download the REs you removed. That fixed it for me. You could also add an exception to the%appdata% Roaming Propellerhead Software RackExtensions directory in your antivirus for future use. Avast kicked Pulsar out of my rack when I wanted to use it 2 days ago, and also blocked it when I wanted to redownload. I used to have the exceptions set already, but apparently, I forgot to set those again after some reinstall.

Setting exceptions does indeed fix this. QwaizanG wrote:Out of curiosity, do other plugin formats trigger anti virus software as well? There must be a way of preventing these situations because not all extensions are being flagged as a virus.

REs are encrypted DLLs, that aren't stored in Program Files. So if their encrypted data matches a pattern, they are highly suspect to an anti-virus program. I don't bother with any more protection than Windows Defender, and common sense. I've never had a false positive for a Rack Extension or anything else.

I've seen plenty of stories of commercial anti-virus programs mistakenly deleting files needed to run Windows.