Free Legal Music Downloads: In China
Downloading music is illegal, right? That's what the Music Industry is telling us all the time. They sue people who download music, and do everything in their might to keep up the image that music downloading is a major crime.
This is however apparently not true in China where Google struck a deal with major players in the Music Industry - to be precise Universal, EMI, Warner and Sony - to provide free full songs in their search engine. About 350K songs are offered in the beginning. That number is said to rise to 1.1 million songs in the next months alone. The songs will feature both local Chinese artists but also international acts.
The reason for Google is that they are only number two in the search engine market in China. Baidu is first there and offering music downloads as well albeit without a similar deal. The reason why the Music Industry agreed to the deal is simple: Money.
The majority of Chinese do not pay for music but download it from the Internet. And so it was decided that sharing some advertising revenue with Google is better than fighting illegal music downloads.
Google is restricting file downloads to Chinese users according to Mashable who were the first to publish the story. The search interface on the other hand is available to anyone.
Definitely an interesting progression especially for Chinese users who can now download music legally while everyone else in the world cannot.
Update: The service has been pulled again from the Google server. It is not clear why and when that happened, only that it returns a not found error when you try to access the website.
We have removed the links as a consequence and suggest you either take a look at free music repositories like Jamendo or the live music archive or at a free music streaming service such as Spotify.
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?