green jigsaw piece! [plugin question]

[JustinThyme]

Hi Danny - when I view lessons (either online or using the CD) I keep getting a message saying 'additional plugins required' and a green jigsaw piece is displayed - usually next to 'download MIDI files' or some such. I try the 'install new plugins' button and am told to install Quicktime. Well, I did that - still no good (the QT icon is in the system tray - latest version [7]). So I went and updated my flash and shockwave plugins - still no good. Its driving me nuts. What plugin am I missing? Running WinXP, btw.

Cheers

JT

[Danny Poole]

There are midi files embedded into some pages, this will be why it is asking for the plugin

1. what browser are you using?
2. what version browser is it?(find this under Help>About....)

Go to Internet Explorer's Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Scroll dow to Multimedia and see if this is ticked "Play sounds in web pages"

If this doesn't solve it then it will either be your version of browser or version of media player. Can you please let me know what they are.

Quicktime overruns the system and tries to take control of every multimedia item on your P.C. I do remember that if you go to the "Control Panel" there will be an item in there for quicktime now that you have installed it. open that and you should find something on midi and browser setting.

Let me know how you go!

[JustinThyme]

Thanks, Danny. Here is the info you requested:

Most often I use Firefox. Info in 'About' = Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7

Media Player is v 10

In IE v 6 both 'play audio' and 'play video files in browser' are ticked. I've just checked the site using IE and the midi files are showing fine, so its a Firefox problem. I went and had a look under options there but didn't find an equivalent to the 'play audio and play video files in browser' setting.

Think I'll just use IE to view the site from now on! Thx for the help

Cheers

JT

[fretdancer]

The answer to this one is as follows ( I presume you are using Mozilla by the way?). First off make sure mozilla is closed.
on the quicktime icon in system tray (bottom right icon section), right click the quicktime icon and choose quicktime preferences, choose the "browser" tab, then the "mime settings" button at the bottom of that window...then expand the "audio" properties and tick the midi box. click OK and you should find it works. (though quicktime is a poor cousin to media player IMO)

[JustinThyme]

Thx for that fretdancer. The MIDI box was already ticked, so it has to be some other quirk. Anyway - your post reminded me of something that should have occured to me before - I made MediaPlayer the default player for MIDI and - voila! I agree about QT, btw - its about to be uninstalled (again).

Cheers

JT

[JustinThyme]

A quick follow-up on this. Its not obvious from the file association screen in MediaPlayer that it will actually play Quicktime movies. I don't know why Microsoft hide this fact. It works fine on my putr, running WinXP. Should this omission be causing anyone else confusion, the way I got round it was as follows:

Right click a .mov file in windows explorer.
From the dropdown menu, choose 'Open With', then 'Choose Program'.
From that dropdown list, choose 'Windows Media Player' and tick the box that says 'Always use the selected program to open this kind of file'.

Worked for me, and I'm happy to say QuickTime is history!

JT