Q. I’m using Windows 98, and I can’t seem to call up a table that associates file attributes with a particular program. What’s the secret? I need to know this because every program capable of dealing with sound, photographs or movies establishes itself as king dog for playing media.
Where do I find whatever program Windows has awarded king-dog status to and change it? Microsoft’s Windows Media Player doesn’t present any setups to alter in that regard.
A. This problem has hit the computing scene hard lately, particularly in offices, because Americans are rushing to their computers for news of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They then get tricked into downloading multimedia players like Real Networks’ Real One or Apple’s QuickTime that try to establish themselves as the default player for all multimedia files subsequently played.
Trusting souls like yourself seem to miss the quiet screens that pop up during installation that allow one to reject the player changes, so they wind up hijacked by another program that seizes what you so aptly call king-dog status.
The reason that the Windows Media Player doesn’t pull the same stunt, I’d wager, is because Microsoft includes that software as the default when Windows first opens.
If you’re happy with the default but decide you want to use some service like the superb Real One to view certain files, watch for those warning boxes and remove the checks from every format except the ones needed for that one service.
Real Networks, for example, is the default for files with extensions such as .ra, .rm and .ram, while QuickTime is a must with files ending in .mov. Both programs also can show other files, play CDs and do most of the other stuff that Windows Media Player does.
Some people, myself included, think these programs do a great job for many types of multimedia defaulted to Windows. But nobody likes to be bushwhacked by a wannabe top dog.
So here’s the drill for restoring files to play in the Windows Media Player.
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Highlight an icon for the file type, such as the blue Q for QuickTime, and give the mouse a right-click while pressing down Enter. You will get a pop-up box, with one choice for Open. Click on that and then pick Choose Program.
This displays a list of all or most of the possible files on the computer, and among them will be Windows Media Player with its orange and red circle around a black VCR-type play arrow. Select it and put a check in the box below for always opening that file type with the software.
Once again Bill Gates’ software will be top dog for that file type. Keep in mind that this can work both ways, allowing you to set various programs to open various multimedia files as you see fit. (12-29-03)
Q. I have a lot of cassettes I would like to convert to print. Is there some software that would provide a fairly high degree of reliability to convert these to a Word file or something like that?
A. I know you’re a man of the cloth, but I still must tell you that it will be a cold day in Honduras before the long-wished dream of converting casually recorded speech on analog audiotapes to computer text is a reality. I can tell you from bitter experience that even the best program (Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking, in my view) can only deal with voice input after you train the system to hear your voice in a certain room where background sound is known.
Even then, you must speak carefully and exactly, as you did during training the software. You can use digital voice recorders to dictate speech that Dragon and other systems can parse, but ordinary analog tapes just won’t do. Though you gave those sermons in your own voice, I fear any effort to play the tape and get the computer to convert it into usable text is futile.
Here is how I get recorded speech into my computer: I use the old radio reporter’s trick of playing the recording through an ear bud while I repeat the words into the microphone using Dragon voice. It would speed up the five to six hours of typing every hour of tape to one hour of talking, but that’s the best you’re going to get with today’s speech technology. Get details about Dragon at DragonTalk.com. (7-14-03)