I do a bit of recording and usually bounce my tracks to 16bit WAVs because Windows Media Player doesn’t support 24bit WAV out of the box and I couldn’t find the right codecs. I also use Windows Media Encoder to convert my WAVs to WMAs for my streaming server and have only been able to use 16bit WAVs for that as well. FFDSHOW allows me to bounce to 24bit and play them in WMP and WME!
Alex Zambelli (an SDET on Codecs) helped out with this:
It might be overkill, but Ffdshow Audio Decoder can handle playback of 24-bit and floating point WAVs in DirectShow (and thus WMP).
http://ffdshow-tryout.sourceforge.net/ has the latest beta 2 build.
To minimize its footprint, disable all video and audio codecs it handles by default during install. Once it’s installed, launch the audio decoder configuration pane and under “Codecs” select “Uncompressed” 24-bit integer.