Online store opens in New Zealand

Six months ago, I changed my Windows User Input Locale setting from English (Australia) to English(New Zealand) to evade the ghastly online stores that had invaded my desktop. When these stores turned up, the album reviews and track listings available through the windowsmedia.com database (the *only* database accessible to WMP users: it's not CDDB and it's not user configurable) were replaced by some really poorly presented rows of unrelated albums generated from the od2.com fugly thumbnail catalog that the vendor wanted to sell. Over the last 6 months, I can confirm that the presentation of this catalog hasn't become any more professional. The ninemsn suggestions are still laid out in a stupefyingly primitive manner.

Tonight I noticed that Digirama had opened as the NZ Music Store, and I thought I may have to reset my locale to English(Belize) (which at time of writing, was still spared the incursion of online stores). Fortunately, the View Album Info function has not been relinquished to the the OD2 fugly thumbnail server and you can still get album reviews from the windowsmedia.com.

If that is lost, I guess I'll be grabbing my scuba gear, sand-fly ointment and heading for Belize...
Published Wed, Apr 13 2005 20:47 by Mike

Comments

# re: Online store opens in New Zealand

But in a way this might be good news too: it means that the stores and the AMG album info are not intertwined. It's a matter of configuration at windowsmedia.com, it's not in the Mediaplayer code. Let's ask windowsmedia.com to change the configuration of the other Input Locale's too!

Wednesday, April 13, 2005 11:48 PM by Mike

# re:Online store opens in New Zealand

^_~,pretty good!csharpsseeoo

Thursday, April 28, 2005 6:13 PM by TrackBack

# re: Online store opens in New Zealand

There is another way of getting the original info back (posted by someone here i think, sorry i don't know who). Close WMP. Block WMP access to go.microsoft.com in your firewall. Delete the registry subkeys at HKCU>Software>Microsoft>MediaPlayer>Services (IF YOU DON'T KNOW WOT I'M TALKING ABOUT DON'T DO THIS!). Hey presto!

Monday, May 16, 2005 5:01 AM by Mike

# re:Online store opens in New Zealand

^_~,pretty good!csharpsseeoo

Wednesday, May 18, 2005 7:04 AM by TrackBack

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