February 21, 2015

Grrrr! Damn you, Microsoft!

I can't change the default player for MP3 files. It's set to "Windows Media Player" and frozen.

I can't uninstall Windows Media Player. It doesn't show up in the "Uninstall or change program" frame in the Control Panel.

I can't run WMP without going through a whole bunch of crap that's supposed to get me to subscribe to title-lookups and setting up playlists and buying stuff from the Microsoft music store and being part of weird social media shit.

This is how it feels:

So all I can do is to remember that I have to drag my MP3 files into Media Player Classic in order to avoid all that. It just plays the file; it doesn't do anything strange. That's what I want, but I can't make MPC my default MP3 player.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 04:17 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 138 words, total size 1 kb.

1 That's really odd that you can't change the default program, I've never experienced that.  What OS version are you on?

Posted by: David at February 21, 2015 05:38 PM (+TPAa)

2 Win 7 Pro

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2015 05:51 PM (+rSRq)

3

It shows up under the Windows Components for me.  I've not tried to uninstall it, because I use it for mp4 files, and it only asked me once about the social media stuff and never again.

Heck, are you sure it's actually WMP and not some lookalike?

Posted by: CatCube at February 21, 2015 06:19 PM (fa4fh)

4 You're right! It never occurred to me that it would be treated as a Windows component instead of an application. So now my MP3 files show up with no association -- but I still can't associate them with MPC! I guess I'll have to let Zoom Player handle them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2015 06:54 PM (+rSRq)

5 Well, I'll have to live with it. I don't actually listen to MP3 files very often, so isn't really a big deal.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2015 07:01 PM (+rSRq)

6 Hrmm... strange one.  MPC has the ability to set association with MP3 files (View > Options > Formats), but Win 7 is preventing that from working?  That's a pain in the butt.

Posted by: sqa at February 21, 2015 07:19 PM (pNJS8)

7 I'm able to just right click on an MP3 file, go to "Open With..." on the context menu, and down at the bottom is Choose Default Program.  MPC is one of the options I get there.

Posted by: David at February 21, 2015 08:08 PM (+TPAa)

8

MPC doesn't show up on mine. It's MPC-HC 64 version 1.7.8.

Also, if I use the "search for app" mechanism and find MPC's exe file and click on that, it gets ignored.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2015 10:28 PM (+rSRq)

9 And SQA gets a button. Using that menu, AND RUNNING AS ADMINISTRATOR, I can checkmark MP3, and now that association works correctly.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2015 10:30 PM (+rSRq)

10 But I bet if WMP was still installed, that wouldn't have worked either. (I'm not going to experiment to find out, though.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 21, 2015 10:43 PM (+rSRq)

11 Getting a good, popular program to operate "normally" takes excessive work, but cruftware & adware can practically take over the computer with 1 misbegotten "Yes" click.
I loathe OSes sometimes.

Posted by: sqa at February 22, 2015 02:11 AM (pNJS8)

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