Find the Cheapest Music at Mp3StoreGuide
Digital music has come a long way. From just one or two portals, the present scenario has an innumerable catalog of stores offering music completely legally and at a reasonable price. Digital music is not without its pitfalls though, most notably DRM. Still, most online stores now offer DRM-free music, which is great news.
One grouse that people might have is if they purchased a song or album online only to discover that another store was offering the same track for a lesser price. That’s where the Mp3StoreGuide can be a real boon. The brainchild of the Mp3Tunes creators, the site is basically a way to check online store prices and find out which store if offering the best rate.
Stores are grouped into three categories; those that carry major labels, minor labels, and stores offering subscription services. Each store has information like average price, song bitrate, country of service, whether the store offers free tracks, etc. Mp3StoreGuide offers users the option of searching each site individually or doing a comparison search.
To test the website, I did a search using both popular and indie artists. A search of U2’s ‘New Years Day’ yielded 67 results while a search for ‘Heaven’ by Hail Social threw up 25 results of which some results were of other songs. Not bad, if I might say so.
For buyers of music online, Mp3StoreGuide is a gem. It’s fast, easy to use, and gives results. The bonus is that the site displays only DRM-free song results. Moreover, the source code is freely available to users who might want to modify it to suit their tastes.
What do you think of the Mp3StoreGuide? Do you like it? How do you think the site can be improved? Let me know in the comments.
Update: The website is no longer available. We have removed the link from the article. There does not seem to be a comparable service available on the Internet right now.
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Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?