I use Winamp as my default MP3 player for Internet Explorer. Every now and again, Apple’s Quicktime player seems to hijack the file association, so that when I download MP3 files off the web, they play using the Quicktime embedded media player (which I dislike).

None of the obvious ways of undoing this hijacking seemed to work. Today, however, I came across a method that does work:

• Load Microsoft’s Windows Media Player
• Under Tools -> Options -> File Types, select MP3 Audio File as one of the filetypes used by WMP and hit Apply. This does some magic that unhooks Quicktime from Internet Explorer and replaces it with Windows Media Player.
• Now if you re-run WinAmp and tell it to reregister its filetypes, it will subvert the Windows Media Player settings, and it will once more become the default MP3 player for Internet Explorer.

Simple when you know how…