Some mp3's or mp4's or wav files that I receive from email won't play in Win Media Player, yet if I convert them to another format like WMA, WAV, MP3, etc then they will play. It only happens with 2 clients of mine, so they are doing something strange on their end, I'm sure. They're both low tech, so quizzing them wouldn't likely get anywhere. So I was wondering is anyone else has seen this sort of problem.
 
On my DAW running Win 8.1 all the files play just fine. My internet computer, which has this problem, is a Gigabyte EP45-DS3R motherboard with a Layla 24 sound card. Under Control Panel / Sounds. I have it set as Layla 1-8 outputs. The only outputs I have going into my monitoring system are 1+2.
 
I was running Win 7 and now I'm running Win 10. I thought when I upgraded it would fix this problem, not so. A while back I even reverted to a very old Win 7 image file, before I installed much of anything and it still did this behavior with that clean Win 7 version.
 
My guess is that maybe Win Media player is not able to read certain sample rates or bits or something. But my Win 8 computer is using Win Media player without this problem, so I'm stumped.
 
Any ideas or similar experiences?
 

They might be encoding at 24 bits. You can do it in Sonar, too, and the mp3s won't play in WMP. Maybe try the free VLC Player or Pot Player, if you can't get your low tech clients to change what they're doing. They'll both play just about anything you throw at them.

Larry Jones
They might be encoding at 24 bits. You can do it in Sonar, too, and the mp3s won't play in WMP. Maybe try the free VLC Player or Pot Player, if you can't get your low tech clients to change what they're doing. They'll both play just about anything you throw at them.

Thank you, Larry. That did the trick. I tried it on several problem files - perfect, easy solution. What's really strange is Win Media player on Win 8 does play those files, yet Win 7 and 10 on my internet computer won't playa them with Win Media player, but VLC i is fine - weird!!!!!!!

Hey Gerry - Glad that works for you. Long ago I decided it's better to get back to work (if you can) than to figure out what the heck was wrong. There are just too many possibilities.