Restored .wma files sound like crap!

[OvenMaster]

I swapped my master hard drive to slave duty, and my slave to master duty (this is so I could have the small one be master, and the big one to store data as a slave), installed XP SP1, installed the SP2 upgrade, Windows Updates, and all my software. So far so good. Then I put all my music files on the slave drive, including a handful of backed up .wma files with licences. The .mp3's all sound fine, but the .wma's sound like crap now. Varying volume, distortion, dropouts. The .wavs and .mp3s made from the original .wma's still sound okay, but I'm stumped as to why the .wma's restored from backups sound lousy. I thought burning a file to CD or DVD for backup didn't alter anything. Nero had burned everything and verified them 100%. Anyone know what I did wrong? Anyone know what happened to make the .wma's sound so bad? Or is there some setting somewhere that I've forgotten to tweak?
Tom

 

[dave597]

>>including a handful of backed up .wma files with licences

do u have the original licesne from the old install backed up? it could be the drm protection messing up the sound quality of those files

 

[OvenMaster]

I think I've found something.
My .wma's are a lot louder than the .wavs and .mp3's I had made of the .wma's. I play my .wma's on WMP10, and when I slide the volume slider way down, and turn up the speakers or headphones to compensate, things sound fine. I'm looking for some sort of gain limiting that's kicking in somewhere!

Tom