Computer gone beserk: WAV files mysteriously converted to MP3

So here's the long story short: We woke up more than a week ago to find that we have major computer problems on the Dell PC. Seems there was a problem with the registry and the computer restored a registry from two years before. (All five backup copies were from two years before!) Computer works, sort of, with a lot of odd things happening. No sound (and we cannot successfully reinstall the drivers). No connection to internet. Odds slightly in favor of a virus, with inevitable corruption of Microsoft Windows 98 SE also a contender.

Put off dealing with this to spend time on GOTV efforts. Election bad, so is computer. A hell of a November so far. . .

We've decided to reformat the computer and are at the data-saving stage before we begin. We have a lot of music files from the good old days of Napster. These were WAV files, and in the past we had burned some CDs with them. (Our CD burner is working fine; have backed up all data files.) But now we find that all the Napster files are MP3 files, and our Adaptec CD burner does not recognize these as audio files (it will only make an audio CD with WAV files).

So the question is: Why would WAV files be converted to MP3 and is there any way to convert them back again? (Keep in mind we can't access the internet from the computer in question.)

If it offers any further clue, two WAV files that were downloaded from elsewhere and were in a separate folder are still showing up as WAV, not MP3, files.

.wav. Then see if you can still play them. Perhaps there is a virus out there that does this, I have not heard... but if you can still play them as mp3's I would think you would be pleased.

Also.. check the file size. Most mp3 songs are between 3 and 5 megs. If they are 30+ megs, they are most likely .wav.

There are free utilities out there that will help you to do batch file renaming if you have dozens of hundreds of files to rename back to .wav.

Personally, I would rather save mp3's because you can put so many on one CD... perhaps 200 or so... then you can always convert them back to .wav at your leisure... hope I helped some.....

just associating them with the icon for mp3's. You can open a folder and under the view, folder options (I think) then file types? you can change the file associations.. ya know.. change which program is assigned to the files that "appear" to be mp3's... as well as editing their file extension back to .wav.

wav files are not going to turn into mp3 files just like that. It takes a lot of effort to encode an mp3 file. Probably just got renamed like the poster above said.

have a very specific format. If Hexadecimal doesn't make you queasy, you can easily view with a editor (its is in RIFF format) or try to play it with Sound Recorder (after changing the extension if necessary). If Sound Recoder can play it (it can't play mp3 files) then it really is a WAV file.

properties of the music files.

BTW, most downloaded Napster music files ARE MP3 files. In those days, rarely did anyone make true WAV files available for downloading. They are just too big. A four minute music file would be over 40 megabytes in size and take forever to download at dial-up speeds. A 4 minute MP3 file is 4 MB in size.