If the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of China is “fake”, “illegal” and those related terms, think again. Google Music was just opened and offered more than a million free, legal songs to Chinese Internet users.

Google is facing a really strong local competitor, Baidu, and Baidu’s special MP3 services especially gave Baidu more than 70% of market share of searching in China. Wanted to take some of its lost market shares back, Google partnered with top100.cn to produce a free platform for everybody.

Most of the songs are 192Kbps… pretty high quality. Some of the English songs, however, I found are really low quality though.

However, note that this music is for China Mainland users only. For those who have a foreign IP, you will see a 403 Forbidden message whenever you try to listen/download songs.

If you haven’t seen this before, you would be wondering – “what in the world is this?”! For those that have already heard about it – yes, its the new generation of iPod shuffles!

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So I was still messing with my Windows 7, browsing web, listening to music… wait, what happened to the music? Why is the beginning cut off?

Something wrong with WMP? Let me download another player and try… wait what? The beginning is still cut off?

Let me move to another computer and try… perhaps it is a Windows 7 issue. And WHAT!? It is still that way?!

That was my short adventure with Windows 7 and WMP 12. I took a search on the Microsoft site, and found this article talking about “an update”.

An MP3 file support issue that is fixed in this update

Every time that metadata is edited in an MP3 file that already contains lots of metadata in the file header, some audio at the beginning of the track may be lost permanently. Up to several seconds of audio may be lost.

I am personally pissed off from this. I mean, I understand that it is beta and it has bugs, but nobody would know until they encounter this problem, have a song’s  beginning cut off and try to search for an answer to it. They should have included in one of the Windows Update update so the user doesn’t suffer.

Well, to fix this bug follow this article and download the update package. Your computer needs to restart, and remember, if you are planning to use Windows 7, DO NOT let WMP touch ANY of your songs until you downloaded this update! 32 Bit click here, 64 Bit click here

Other than this bug, everything seems to be fine. I will post some screenshots when I have time =)