Music From Next to Nothing

Now you (and I) have lost the excuse of not producing music because we don't have source material:

Music from Windows Sounds

Link via The Old New Thing, an excellent inside-Microsoft blog. That's ModPlug Tracker in the video, by the way.

Windows Media Player 11 Gets FLAC

And you thought I'd run out of bad puns, didn't you? For shame. Since I've started ripping CDs to FLAC (this started when I discovered FLAC about a year ago), I obviously need a media player that handles the format. Unfortunately, Windows Media Player does not fit that description. Winamp has built-in support, but it's getting a little long in the tooth. I'd prefer to use WMP11, if only it would actually play my music.

Enter illiminable. Simply install the DirectShow filters from that site, and your copy of WMP11 (or any other player that uses DirectShow) will be able to play FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files. There is a slightly annoying part: the 'Open File' dialog still does not recognize .flac files as playable music files, so you will need to switch to 'All Files' and visually detect the format of each file. It's a tradeoff - and there's probably an inverse relationship between your level of annoyance at this and the level of organization in your music collection. (Both of my levels are somewhere around 'medium'.)