I occasoinally use Morpheus to find new music. When doing so, it not only shows a banner ad in the client, but periodically fires up pop-up windows which are extremely annoying. I have PopUp Killer but the damn thing opens an ad like every 2 or 3 minutes and my system slows down a lot while PopUp killer battles to close it quickly.

So does anyone know of any way to disable ads in Morpheus? I don't mind the banner in the corner, but is there a way to turn off these popups? Any kind of patch? I'm almost not inclined to use the service because of the goddamn ads.

If all of the ads are coming from the same server, add that server to your Windows HOSTS file and make it resolve to 127.0.0.1.

Dunno if the ads will pop up as empty windows or if they will not pop up at all...

You might also choose to use a different product to kill your pop-ups, something that doesn't slow down your CPU. On my Windows2K box, I'm using PopUp Ad Filter, but it doesn't work right on my Win98 box, so I don't know how to test against it.

Thanks for the tip on Popup Ad Filter, I installed it and it works great!

On the HOSTS file approach...

Go here and download their hosts file. It is already populated with tons of ad servers.

I found these instructions on the web somewhere a while back, and they fixed it on my machine:

To stop those annoying ads from popping up when you open up morpheus

1. open up ie
2. go to internet options
3. security settings
4. restricted sites
5. click sites
6. add ads.musiccity.com

Excellent... You da man, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Is Morpheus down? I never upgraded past version 1.3.3 because I heard that they may have added the ability to remotely turn off the software (since they can't kill the network's server - there is none). But now Morpheus won't connect.... Maybe my admin blocked it? Oh well, I only needed one track for a comedy show, so it's not a big deal.

Yeah I think it's down. I came home today and I was disconnected and when I tried to connect I got "your version of Morpheus is too old to connect to the network. Please download an updated version..." There is no new version, and, in fact, www.musiccity.com isn't responding... I think I hear the death bell tolling...

Yeah, it appears that Morpheus is down. Then they say to go to musiccity.com to download the new software. One catch: it doesn't exist. Or perhaps there's too many hits right now to show it or something. All I know is that the address doesn't appear.

try this: http://proxomitron.org/

It can do a lot more than just block sites ...