n4cer of ActiveWin fame has alerted me to a work around for the “buy, Buy, BUY!” of Windows Media Player 10.

My basic problem is this - I like album art, but I don't like the constant links to buy music that I already legally own.

The workaround -

1. From the Now Playing screen, right click on the album in the lower right hand corner and uncheck “Show Media Information”.  The album cover and buy music link should disappear.
2. Download the Energy Bliss visualization here.
3. Install it.
4. On the Now Playing screen, right click and select “Windows Media Player 10”, then Energy Bliss.
5. Notice that the album art is back (with some dancing blue squares) and that there are no buy links to bug you.

I've been using the RTW of Windows Media Player 10 for a few days now.  Generally speaking, I'm happy with it.  The “I'll keep appearing when you mouse near me“ menu bar bug (or was that a feature?) is now dead.  You can now open an AV file from the Internet and still resume what you were listening to before (big kudos on this!).  Here are a few gripes..

At last count, I had 1460 wma files and 1621 mp3 files.  The files were ripped from CDs I legally own or were legally downloaded (mostly audio books in mp3).  So, all my stuff is legal, yet WMP10 prompts me at every available opportunity to buy the CD of the currently playing song.  Is there any reason I should buy something I already own?  Does WMP10 think that I have illegal songs?  I'm all for helping people to be legal and I'm all for letting people know they can buy music directly via WMP10, but I'm not for the implication (or waste of screen real estate) that my stuff is not legit.

I don't really like the embedded IE in WMP.  OK, I don't know for sure that it's IE, but I'm pretty dang sure.  IE or not, I'm annoyed that I have to use WMP's menus to navigate stuff.  No forward/back via my mouse (IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0).  No alt+right arrow/alt+left arrow.  No right clicking.  Grr.  You know it's a browser.  I know it's a browser.  Let's stop playing games and let me use it as a browser.

I wonder why Play Count is still not in the standard set of displayed columns.  I care far more about it than I do about genre or whether it is DRM'ed.  What I'd like is a “make all views look like this one” so I can set the columns I want to see in the order I want to see them.

I like the new color schemes, but I think they need a bit of polishing.  First, altering colors still requires too much menu navigation (View | Enhancements | Color Chooser).  What happened to that paint brush icon in the lower right corner that WMP9 had?  Second, the colors are a bit too, well, I'm not a graphic design guy, so I don't know what to call it.  I know, though, that white text on a shiny gold-ish background is really hard to read though.  I know that the mini player looks a bit too much like over zealous use of lens flairs.  Third, why is there no option for the player's color to match that of the currently selected Windows XP visual style?  Fourth, in mini player mode, why does the volume control background color not reflect the color of the rest of the player?  My color is currently gold-ish (I'm trying to match the Olive visual style), but the volume control is light blue.

I really don't like the popup “This is what's playing“ that happens when you mouse near the player in mini mode.  I'd like to disable that.  I don't need to know what's playing (I can hear it), and I don't need to see a mini visualization window.

All in all, I prefer it to WMP9 (and all other players I've used).  Still, there are some issues that I hope are resolved in the next release.

Yep, I'm still alive.  The FlyingJ experience has gone well.  Last week they invited me to upgrade from contract to employee status.  I'm in the processing stage now, so soon I'll be a normal employee again.  Wow, it's been a while.

I've got some unrelated items to post about, so here they are in no particular order -

If you are doing WinForms development and need borders on your custom controls, you might consider inheriting from System.Windows.Forms.Form rather than from UserControl.  You'll have to remember to set TopLevelControl to false and to set ControlBox to false, but otherwise, things will be very similar to deriving from UserControl (with the exception of a much richer set of properties and events).  Oh, one other thing, remember to explicitly set Visible to true, when you add your new control to the Controls collection of a form or control.

Two weeks ago, I dreamed that Robert Scoble stopped blogging.  He declared that he just didn't see the point of it any more and had better things to do with his time.  I guess my mind didn't see that as too strange considering some of the other things that have happened lately - Microsoft and AOL settled and stopped throwing mud, Microsoft and Sun settled and stopped throwing mud, W3C and many others came to Microsoft's aide in their fight against Eolas.  I don't know what in the tech world would surprise me at this point.  Perhaps Ellison could publicly call Bill a nice guy?  Hmm, some things are just too far fetched.

I picked up two new (but old) CDs - 10,000 Maniacs Unplugged and The Cranberries Unplugged (a compilation of several live/unplugged events).  With the 10,000 Maniacs purchase, my music collection is now fully legal.  I've had one dubbed tape, which I received about 10 years ago, that was holding me back.  Horrah!

I finally watched, for the first time, the movie AI.  Not sure what I think of it.  It was interesting and certainly far better than Anti-Trust, another movie from a similar time frame.

Last but not least, after fighting with the beta team on a previous Microsoft beta that same team invited me back...oddly enough, it seems the structure of the beta has changed somewhat and is now in line with what I suggested.  I doubt it was me that made the difference, but I'm glad to know that Microsoft learns even from folks who fight with them.

I applied a firmware update to my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra and it seems I can now have multiple files with the same file name.  The problem before, I think, is that there was no support for folders.  If you had two songs with the same name, it was impossible to differentiate between them.  Now, and I'd guess with something like folders, but perhaps based on metadata (like album, author, singer, etc.), the problem seems to have gone away.

I made this discovery today, since this is the first time I've synch'ed since last December.  I read about stretched Beethoven on Raymond Chen's blog, and wanted to copy the mp3's to my Nomad.  Good times.

OK, not really the top ten, just the first random ten.  I read a blog yesterday (sorry,can't seem to find it now) about doing a playlist of all tracks in your music library, randomizing it, then listing the first 10 no matter how embarrassing.  I decided I'd do it too.

Here are the first ten music files in my list:

1. Track 3, Disk 1, La Boheme
2. Track 18, Disk 2, Bach St. Mathew Passion
3. Track 2, Mozart Requiem K, 626 in D Minor
4. Dances of the Corps de Ballet and Dwarfs, Swan Lake AIII, S2
5. Schindler's Workforce, Schindler's List Soundtrack
6. Dead Man's Hill, Swamp Ophelia, Indigo Girls
7. Track 12, Disk 3, Bach St. Matthew Passion
8. Drug Ballad, The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem
9. I'm Goin' Home, Cracked Rear View, Hootie & the Blowfish
10. I Just Can't Wait to Be King, The Lion King Soundtrack

I think a more useful bit of info is my most listened to tracks.  Here's the top ten according to Windows Media Player 9.  This does not take into account the play count for tracks listened to on my Nomad.  The play count is in parentheses.

1. The Plagues, Prince Of Egypt Soundtrack (85)
2. A Love Before Time [Mandarin], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Soundtrack (71)
3. A Love Before Time [English], Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Soundtrack (70)
4. Once Upon a December, Liz Callaway, Anastasia Soundtrack (70)
5. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Soundtrack (69)
6. Theme from Schindler's List, Schindler's List Soundtrack (68)
7. I Could Have Done More, Schindler's List Soundtrack (67)
8. Once Upon a December, Deana Carter, Anastasia Soundtrack (67)
9. Track 10, Back Brandenburg Concertos (64)
10. Track 9, Back Brandenburg Concertos (64)

It's amazing what you find on the Internet looking for something else.  Yesterday, I had a small dispute with my friend regarding the date of Kurt Cobain's death.  I claimed spring 1994 (April or May), and he claimed it was in the fall.  As soon as I remembered we had talked about that, I google'd a bit to find the date.  As it turns out, Kurt was found dead 8 April 1994.

That's what I was looking for.  What I wasn't looking for was the notes of a private investigator implicating Courtney Love in Kurt's murder.  I'm not sure what to think about his statements, and I find it very curious that the PI is selling his case file.  I know, though, that I'm sad once again thinking of Kurt's death.

He and I weren't exactly best buds.  I was just one of a few million other fans who had never met him but could feel like I knew him through his music.  It was an raw, emotional, eternal, eerie music.  I once thought I knew exactly how Kurt felt.  Probably not, since I didn't partake of any of his lifestyle (no grunge, no drugs, etc.), but I was just a dumb teen fan back then.  Still, he was one, whose music I could relate to as a teen.  I suppose, perhaps, thinking again about Kurt's death is like thinking again about John Lennon's death for those a generation or so older than I.

Back in the day, I used to be quite a “music affects your mood” kind of guy.  I think I still believe that a lot.  The question for me is this - how exactly does it affect my mood?

For the last few months, I've been listening to a hefty amount of random classics - Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky, etc.  I even scaled back on Collective Soul, because it was too hard.  Hmm.

Well, today was one of those try my patience days.  I didn't do too well.  I found myself getting less than happy about silly little things.  Finally, I decided I'd had it with Enya.  Her soothing Watermark clearly wasn't soothing my mind.  What replaced her?

Eminem.  Perhaps it's one of those projection defense mechanism things.  By the time I got to “When I was just a little baby boy, my momma used to tell me these crazy things...” (Kill You on Marshall Mathers LP), I was nice and calm and making (hopefully) two of my clients happy.

Em and I have a curious relationship.  I don't like a lot of what he says.  I don't like the fact that I listen to him.  I do, though, like that fact that I'm much less angry when I listen to him.  I just don't get it.  How does one of the angriest men in the pop music world calm me down?

I bought the Brandenburg Concertos a few years ago, but I never listened to them.  I altered that behavior last week.  I really like them.  Go Bach!