XP labels mp3 files as wav?

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Heliocentrical

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Mar 28, 2005
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I recently ripped 2 new albums to my mp3 collection and noticed that when you do a mouse over it says the track is a wav file. I also noticed that the folder did not show common folder tasks as it should with a folder containing mp3 files. I checked the properties of each file and they are indeed mp3's. Most are only 3 or 4 meg in size and a wav would be much larger. They are encoded at 128k bps. Anyone wanna take a guess as to what is causing this? Thanks in advance.
 
Go Explorer - Folder Options - View

Then Deselect "Hide Extensions for Known File Types"

Now look at the files again. Are they named:

Backstreet Boys - Back Street's Back.wav

or

Backstreet Boys - Back Street's Back.mp3

Windows XP has very dumb filetype/MIME resolution. As far as I know it just looks at the extension of the file to determine the filetype.
 
I did what you asked and the filename that results is:

Back Street's Back.wav

Yet when I look at the advanced properties of the file it says this:

Audio Format : MPEG Layer-3

How does that make any sense? I decided to see what would happen if I renamed the file extension so I renamed it to:

Back Street's Back.mp3

I recieved a warning about corrupting playback ability but it still plays and now xp says it's an mp3 file. WTF? I dont understand why only 25 songs did this and the rest are fine.
 
Aratech said:
I did what you asked and the filename that results is:

Back Street's Back.wav

Yet when I look at the advanced properties of the file it says this:

Audio Format : MPEG Layer-3

How does that make any sense? I decided to see what would happen if I renamed the file extension so I renamed it to:

Back Street's Back.mp3

I recieved a warning about corrupting playback ability but it still plays and now xp says it's an mp3 file. WTF? I dont understand why only 25 songs did this and the rest are fine.
Click to expand...

Perhaps a bug in your CD ripping software? It's hard to know unless I see exactly what programs you accessed those files with. Either way XP should never be messing with your file extensions - if it is there's something wrong.

Just see what happens now and if you have no further problems consider yourself lucky. :D
 
WAV is a container like AVI. It USUALLY contains PCM, but it's quite capable of containing MP3. It's pretty much the same thing but with WAV's headers (RIFF headers). Most programs will be fine with you just renaming them to .mp3, but leaving them as-is is fine.
 
Well it must have been that the program I was using became corrupted somehow. I reinstalled it and re-ripped the affected files and they now show the appropriate extensions.
 
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