This is nuts ... or rather, it was nuts -- after wrestling with it for hours, something happened and it fixed itself. So if the symptom on the subject line intrigues you, I'll leave this post here for a while in case it inspires an insight from a similar happening, and maybe a reply that can lead to a valuable fix for next time. But if it's not compelling, don't spend time reading this post -- there are too many others out there that have repeatability. This one was a fluke.

Anyway the labor that vaporized most of today was that a handful of mp3's I downloaded in the spring and summer have played great for months. This was the first time to put mp3 files on the system. All the sudden today, a song I downloaded on LimeWire had a warped twang to it. So I downloaded it again ... and still again ... and it seemed that every file in existence out there of Richard Marx's "More Than Words" was corrupt ... really unlikely, but that's what it seemed.

I gave up for the moment and turned to reviewing some other pieces I have, and they, too, were now distorted ... in a short span I discovered that my entire small collection is ruined. Instruments are degraded only a little, and are almost passable. While voices drop in volume to a fourth of their original, and sound as though they're coming through a tunnel -- faint, warbling, tinny and with an echo.

If I do a clean conversion to mp3 from CD using iTunes, there's no problem.

I suspected a virus, and wiped the OS and reinstalled everything, so the whole OS is as though on a new drive. Yet still the same crippled audio, to my surprise.

A pop-up appeared saying I needed an Indeo codec to play the "current selection," or something like that. That's been coming up for the last half year every time I open the folder I use for sharing LW files, but I always cancelled, as it didn't seem to have anything to do with anything. Now, I thought, that must be the key -- some kind of change in protocol, or in the Windows Media Player, is now requiring it. Well that was probably a wrong guess as I was seeing later in its release notes that it's been separately needed since 2002 on XP installs. Right or wrong, I found it on LimeWire and installed it.

Yet even with the new codec installed, same sorry playback. The Indeo website is saying that version 2.5 is the current audio codec, which is the same version number as what I downloaded, according to the release notes that came with it. It seems nothing has changed version-wise since October 2002.

I have a Flash mp3 player on hand, so I set it up, and same trouble. Same trouble in iTunes. Wondering if an audio-infecting virus targeted my mp3 files, I checked their last revise date, but those dates are all from some time ago.

Any ideas? ... puzzling.

----------------------------------

Well, that's where the original post ended. The only thing to add is that after the OS overwrite, then the Indeo install, and then confirming that all songs were still ruined, I took a break. I came back, and decided to see if perhaps a newly downloaded file would play alright, maybe free of whatever strain had contaminated every other mp3 on the system, if that was the case. I got onto LimeWire to grab one song and log off before anything viral might taint the system. I played it in all 3 players, found it as wrecked as before.

Then, on aimlessly dragging one more song into Windows Media Player for the heck of it, as something to do while I resigned myself to being frozen out of all shared music for this multimedia project, I discovered that it played correctly. I tried another ... and another ... all had rebounded back to hi-fidelity.

Now it all seems normal, where I was 8 hours ago. That's puzzling, too.