My Winamp started acting funny and refused all of a sudden to play my .fla files. Since this was after an upgrade to 5.35, it was clearly some change in the system itself. What made it even more confusing was the fact that some files played and some didn’t. When I finally had tome to check it out, it was a pretty “easy” fix. Easy, if you know how:

1. Start Winamp
2. Right-click Winamp
3. Select Options
4. Select Preferences
5. Select Plug-Ins and if necessary double-click it to reveal the sub-items
6. Select Input under Plug-Ins
7. Double click the FLAC decoder
8. Ooops… Someone forgot to include FLA, so add it as per instructions in the window you opened in the previous step
9. Select OK and then close the Options window

Now .fla files will work without even restarting Winamp.

And, yes, the files working all the time had the .flac extension…