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Lifehacker
Dear Lifehacker,
Windows Media Player hijacked my MP3 files and converted them all to WMA. I want to change them back easily in one sweep—but am not the most savvy user. Help?
Signed,
Gimme My Beats Back
Original photo by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
Posted by Angus Kidman at 4:01 PM on September 24, 2008
After Sanity launched its Australian Loadit music subscription service last month, there were muffled complaints about the price, but the biggest complaints of all came from users who didn't want the Loadit button appearing in their Windows Media Player by default. The Loadit store is automatically added when you check for updates, and by the time you realise it has appeared, it's a bit late to do anything about it. If you don't want to have Loadit in your face every time you play a song or video clip, do you have any choice? Lifehacker explores your options.
Posted by Angus Kidman at 8:23 PM on August 14, 2008
Subscription services -- where you pay a monthly fee in return for streaming and/or download access to a large music library -- are common in the US, but Sanity's new LOADIT service is the first such option we've encountered in Australia. For $29 a month, you can download up to 300 tracks each month. Tracks are encoded in Windows Media Audio format, which means you can only play them back in Windows Media Player 11 (which is where the service is accessed) or on WMA-compatible MP3 players. That means no joy for iPod fans. Does the notion of a download subscription service appeal to you, or would you rather purchase go-anywhere music? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Now that the Xbox 360 has been updated to support DivX/XviD playback, work-arounds like conversion and the Transcode 360 Media Center hack aren't strictly necessary. The Pain in the Tech blog offers two walkthroughs for using Winamp Remote (part of Winamp 5.5) or Windows Media Player 11 to stream video from your PC to your XBox. Both programs have their pros and cons (based mainly on media accessibility versus buffering times), but both also get the job done. If you've put together your own PC-to-Xbox streaming solution, let's hear it in the comments.
You've put together the perfect holiday playlist for your office party and don't want anyone to mess with your computer while the music's pumping? The How-To Geek weblog highlights a lesser-known feature of Windows Media Player that allows you to lock the screen in fullscreen mode, enter a 4-digit PIN, and leave your computer safely pumping out tunes. It's not groundbreaking, but I can say that I do wish iTunes had something similar for fullscreen Cover Flow mode.
For some people, desktop media player applications are a very personal thing. Rather than living life in the vanilla world of iTunes and Windows Media Player, these music lovers prefer media players they can tweak, customise, and personalise to their heart's content. Today we're taking a look a look at user-submitted pictures of their always impressive and often enviable desktop media players. Hit the jump to take a look, and if you see one you like, find out how they did it.
