Messing With My Computer

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Messing With My Computer

There is nothing I hate more about software than when it messes with my computer.

I have spent hours (probably days) getting things the way I like them on my laptop and I don't want anyone changing the settings without my knowledge.

So when I recently downloaded Yahoo! Music Engine, I found that all my media files (mp3s, mpeg4, etc) are now set to be played by Yahoo! Music Engine.

But I want Quicktime to play mpeg4 and I want iTunes to play mp3s.

So I opened those programs and set them as the default player.

But Yahoo! Music Engine must have messed with my computer good because it keeps changing them back.

That is not cool. I want to stop this once and for all and if I don't find a way to override this bad behavior soon, I will remove Yahoo! Music Engine from my computer and never put it back on.

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Posted February 21, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

I just noticed the same thing today when I went to play some music I downloaded from emusic.com. The default player was now the Yahoo! Music Engine. If you figure out a fix to this problem please post it. Thanks

Posted by: Tom O'Brien | Feb 22, 2006 12:21:24 AM

Yahoo has a tendency for this, the latest IM version was "boobytrapped": you had to make extra clicks to pull up the otherwise hidden menu and remove the defaults to change your settings.

Posted by: Zoli Erdos | Feb 22, 2006 12:24:32 AM

Fred, I don't have the Yahoo Music Engine installed. But I did a search and found these instructions for turning the associations off.

You need to turn them OFF in Yahoo, not turn them ON in the other player. Apparently Yahoo seems to think if you do this, the other players are doing this innapropriately.

From the File menu, select Preferences
on the My Music tab:
File Associations: This box indicates file types for which you want the Yahoo! Music Engine to be the default player. By default, all the file types that Yahoo! Music Engine plays are highlighted. To individually select a file type, first click Select None then click a file type to add. Shift-click to select more than one file type.

You should only associate those files you want to be associated with Yahoo Music player - so, in your case uncheck mpeg4 and mp3.

Restore file associations at Yahoo! Music Engine startup: This disables other players that try to over-write your preferences here.

You should make sure this is unchecked, so Yahho doesn't reset the settings each time it starts up

read here for details...
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/music/yme/playing/playing-03.html

good luck. hope this helps

Posted by: Paul | Feb 22, 2006 10:07:55 AM

Howdy,

Ian from Yahoo! Music here.

We didn't do anything intentionally evil with the grabbing of types. We'll look into it and see if there's a bug of some sort we need to address, or if we just need to make this easier.

Sorry for the hassle.

ian

Posted by: ian c rogers | Feb 22, 2006 10:47:27 AM

"We didn't do anything intentionally evil with the grabbing of types. We'll look into it and see if there's a bug of some sort we need to address, or if we just need to make this easier."

Whether it Yahoo's moves are intentional or not is irrelevant. These companies annoy consumers by building features that automate what hould properly be decisions made by customers. On the one hand, it's interesting that omeone claiming to be from Yahoo comments on this blog post, but on the other, it is rather absurd that such a blog post even has to be written.

The only good that can come out of this is that Yahoo is trashed in the blogosphere. Will companies ever learn?

Posted by: Dave | Feb 24, 2006 8:24:53 AM

would like to kow if anyone can help me uninstall quicktime when i go to download ituns7 when it gets to quicktime it says an older version on computer cannot de removed.. I do not see it in tool bar or on my add or remove program any advice thank you

Posted by: lisa | Feb 5, 2007 8:57:42 AM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC