Compressed Mp3 Files?

While trying to play some music using windows media player 10 i get an error telling me that the file is a compressed media that is unreadable. The file is in a mp3 format. while looking into the file i found that it is not registering as an mp3 file at all (it does not allow the usually tagging features and such). so my question is, does anyone know how to uncompress the file that is compressed into the mp3? if it helps to exclude any ones suggestions im running Combined Comunity Codecs to run some video formats, so i have already tried installing codecs to run this file.

Compressed Mp3 Files?
you cannot decompress a compressed file. Too much information has already been lost during the compression phase to help. You also have the added problem of the file not being able to be read. This means that the file is either of another format and is improperly labeled or that the file was corrupted either during the encoding process or at some other point.





Your best bet is to burn fresh copies yourself. I'd recommend using the LAME codec to do this.





You should also consider upgrading to Windows Media 11.
Reply:Try droppign it into a program like Winamp and see if it plays.





Chances are it is jsut compressed into a different format and someone changed the extension to .mp3





One user stated you can not decompress it. This is false, however, it IS true that if you do find the format and decompress it, you will lose significant quality, IF IT IS A LOSSY FORMAT. When you decompress it to a wav it will still sound just as bad as it originally did before. When you recompress it as MP3, it will add even more artifacts. (Undesirable noise)





If you find a way to play it I suggest keeping it as is and playing it that way.





Just realized too, if you try changing the .mp3 extension to something else it may work, but again, I suggest Winamp it has broader codec support than WM. It could be FLAC, AAC, OGG, APE, SHN, there is a lot, but few are common really.
Reply:An uncompressed mp3 is a WAV file





A wave file is ... say an exact replica of the sound itself...





To answer your question, the only way to uncompress this file is to figure out what it was compressed with...





the compression type is literally the 'key' all mp3's are compressed the same way. wma files are compressed differently.





there really isn't a way to 'uncompress' it. Once a sound or video file is compressed.. the information is gone. thats why its smaller.