Windows Vista mp3's stopped playing all of a sudden?!

Hi all,

I built a Vista machine just to play with. It's in my son's room and one of the things he likes are the soundtracks to LOTR and POTC movies, so I put those mp3's on it for him.

This was about 2 weeks ago.

Two days ago he told me the songs no longer worked (he's 6, best description I got). So I went up there and he's right. They just don't play! I've tried in both Winamp and WMP 11. The files are fine, but when you load them in either program and click play, absolutely nothing happens. No errors, no nothing. In WMP, the Play button changes over to Pause as if it were playing, but they don't.

Weird...

Anyone have any thoughts? I have these same mp3's on at my personal home and work workstations (both XP) and they play fine for me. I have to assume it's a Vista thing.

Thanks!

Chris

 

LOL, Yeah, that's not it. Believe me, that was the first thing I checked, but in either program the progress bar for the files are not moving. They simply don't even play.

 

Chris,
Do the files play if you click on them in the folder they are installed in. They should start whatever the default player for them is. If they do then the playlist folder path that WMP 11 and Winamp use may have changed?

A long shot, but try changing the .mp3 file extension on the offending files to .wav.

 

No matter how I launch them, they don't play. Whether it's from first loading them into a player or double-clicking them from the filesystem.

I will try the WAV renaming tonight and let you know.

I wonder, though... Is there some form of DRM oddity in Vista that could be causing this? Because this Vista machine is the only one with the issue.

 

Hi all,

I wanted to let you all know I'm still having this problem, but I've found something weird. About every two weeks, the files stop playing. Rebooting fixes it, but only for two weeks. This cycle repeats...

Huh?!

Changing the file extension to WAV causes them to not work at all.

Chris