My Windows Media Player 10 seems to have become stuck in "quiet mode", whereby all the dynamic range of music sounds squashed, compressed, limited and/or clipped. The same music files play normally with other players like Winamp, and of course they used to play fine with Windows Media Player before this started happening.

I tried reinstalling WMP10 over top of the existing installation but it didn't solve
the problem. I'm not sure if the player is actually stuck in "quiet mode" or if
it's compressing the audio for another reason. It doesn't look like a sound
driver problem though (nVidia) since my other players aren't affected, although I did update to the latest version. Suggestions?

Have you looked to see what DSP / Equalizer settings WMP has active? Perhaps there is something in there.

All the EQ and DSP options are turned off. That includes Volume Leveling and Quiet Mode, yet it sounds like one of those are affecting the audio anyway. Also I don't have any additional DSP plug-ins installed.

Same behavior from any form of audio, even WAV?

This is not gonna solve your problem, but why would you want to use windows media player these days when you can choose from so many better audio players freely available on the net?

Sure I use some other players too, but I like to keep my options open. I actually don't find Windows Media Player so bad (other than this bug) and I'd like it get it back to working properly.

In response to grommet, it's happening on WAVs, videos, everything.

Do you have any DShow filter like ffdshow that 'normalizes' audio files installed?
Shouldn't have anything to do w/ it, but hey...

Thank you! I had installed a "video" codec pack a few days ago (Theorica) in an unsuccessful attempt to play an unrecognized AVI file, and ffdshow was a part of it. Luckily there was an uninstaller. Problem solved. It's not the first time I've been burned by one of those all-in-one codec packs, I guess they're just bad news. Anyway, I knew I'd get an answer here -- I really appreciate it sh1leshk4.