soundsol

I have decided that Olorin wins the both the best insult award AND the chauvinist pig of the year award! Still laughing here.....maybe I'm a chauvinist too!

I have both Windows media player and Real Player....the latest edition of which replaced the need to have both the older version of real player and then adding real jukebox later. I have perhaps 1900 or so songs on my computer. I DON'T like windows media player for the obnoxious way it assumes any music you have is illegal and bars you from playing it. Here was my exact problem .I had recorded hundreds of songs from dozens of purchased CD's ....mostly I originally recorded them on real player/real jukebox on an older computer. Subsequently my old computer got fried but I was able to salvage all the music files and copy them to my new computer...which took hours since it was about 7 gigs of music....anyway on the new computer I had windows media player preinstalled .....it would not let me play the songs I LEGALLY recorded from cd's saying there was some sort of license problem!....it was because they weren't originally recorded on windows media player but recorded on real player or real jukebox. To me....microsoft doing that is ILLEGAL.Just because I didn't use windows media player to originally record them...that means they are punishing me for having the gall to have used real jukebox to record music...that is also punishing "real" for having the gall to "invent" the software necessary to record music in the first place! To make matters worse.....150 or so CD's were stolen out of my car so I couldn't even rerecord them on my computer at all......thus making it "legal" in microsoft's eyes...! So I downloaded real player and made it my default player and use it to play the darn music. It does everything windows media player does as far as i can see and organizes the music a little better also. The weird thing about this whole scenario is that the "legal" music I have on my computer won't play on windows media player but the "illegal" music will play. Also the stuff i originally recorded on real jukebox still wont play since microsoft's windows media player wopn't let me change it into a real player file. Way to go microsoft.....you got it backwards! Frankly someone should start a class action suit against microsoft for this behavior...it is obnoxious and against the Sherman antitrust act et al.... by the way....Canada has declared file sharing "legal" so all the "music police" and litigators of 10 year olds downloading music on their grandpa's computer can't be sued in Canada or even threatened to be sued in Canada without reprisal from the Canadian government itself!. My feeling about the whole legal, illegal music scenario is this...if I buy the damn music...it is mine....there was never any squabble about rerecording cassettes or recording plastic and vinyl.....now greed by the recording artists and their army of litigators has made little kids into criminals....so sad....

re: networking windows xp and windows 98 I an an audio lover that finds jobs for tranducer engineers as a career. MY AUDIO KNOWLEDGE FAR EXCEEDS MY COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE> I have one computer with windows xp professional and had another with windows 98. I have cable internet access. I networked the two using a dlink ethernet broadband router. One cable from one computer in one slot in the router, the other cable from the other computer in another slot of the router. Both computers were turned off at the time. When I turned on both computers, the one which had wondows xp recognized new hardware and installed it. I then went to the network wizard and choose the window xp computer as the primary computer to go online with. It went through various steps and had me insert a floppy which it loaded settings on. It then instructed me to insert the floppy into the other computer and I loaded it there. At some point it told me it was done and would I like to restart both computers so the installation would be complete. I said yes and the xp one restarted and viola ! the network was up and operating. Later on I added file sharing and printer sharing. Its probably a good idea to make the sharing password protected since there are HUGE security holes for trojans when you share files and printers. Anyway I'm just semi literate and it worked for me. Later on the Windows 98 computer fried itself to death when a heating fan failed and I bought an athlon preloaded with xp. I did the same procedure and networked them both quickly. My guess is I was just lucky because not being a computer pro, I have to be methodical and read carefully the instructions for each step or maybe Ijust was lucky enough to buy the correct router or something. Hope this helps.