This is a weird one. I'm putting music together for a dance competition and out of hundreds of successful transfers, I had two strange mp3 files that gave me an unusual experience.
The first thing I do with all this stuff is convert all the many file types I get into 44.1/16 wave files. This gives me two things. A successful conversion typically means that the file isn't corrupted and won't cause me any technical glitches doing simple playback, and having all playback be the same predictable file type avoids any hiccup with changing sample rate or other variables in the context of the event. I do this most often using the Batch Converter in Sound Forge, which is able to read and write the many different common files that I'll get.
Now in the case of these two files, they both show up as .mp3 and play in WMP, RealPlayer, Winamp, etc, but Forge can't even open them, let alone convert them. I even tried importing them into Sonar, which is another thing that sometimes has worked with oddball issues, but nope.... No dice. My only successful workaround was to burn an audio CDRW using Windows Media Player, and then rip the audio from that.
Any ideas of what I might have missed, if anything?