Windows Media Player Plus! - Various enhancements for WMP Options

[Tim De Baets]

I would like to announce the release of Windows Media Player Plus!, a free plug-in that offers the following enhancements/improvements for WMP:

• Tag Editor Plus: an alternative for WMP's Advanced Tag Editor. Tag Editor Plus works on WMP 12 too, where the Advanced Tag Editor has been removed.
• Global hotkeys, allowing you to control WMP from within any running application.
• Party Shuffle: a dynamic playlist, that automatically gets filled up with randomly picked songs. Of course, you can still add songs yourself, and reorder/remove songs, just like with a normal playlist.
• Real 'find as you type' in the library: you can simply start typing to search, without having to click on the Search field first.
• Access the standard Explorer right-click menu of a media file directly from within WMP.
• Restore last active playlist, media item, and playback position at WMP startup.
• Show currently playing media in WMP's title bar.
• Advanced playback options: Stop after current and Close after current, to automatically stop playback or close WMP when the current media has ended.
• Let WMP play/pause when you press the space bar.
• Disable group headers in the Library Pane.
• Enhanced and configurable replacement of the Windows Live Messenger Music plug-in (What I'm Listening To).
• Show currently playing media in Skype's mood message.
• Access the properties (settings) of any WMP plug-in from within the main menu (Tools - Plug-in properties), without having to go to Options first.
• "Play next" option when right-clicking a media item in WMP 11's library (WMP 12 already has this by default).
• Quickly re-enable all plug-ins after a WMP crash.

Windows Media Player Plus! is written for Windows Media Player 11 and 12.

For more information and screenshots, please visit the official Windows Media Player Plus! web page.

Download Windows Media Player Plus!

July 4, 2010: version 1.1 fixes a crash when accessing the Windows Media Player Plus! settings while the plug-in is disabled.

March 19, 2011: version 2.0 offers an improved Tag Editor Plus (now with support for album art and batch editing), global hotkeys, Party Shuffle, and much more.

March 30, 2011: version 2.1 fixes some stability issues that were still present in the recently-released 2.0 version.

November 18, 2012: version 2.5 adds full Unicode support, 'Find in library' for Windows Media Player 12, support for Windows 8, and a whole bunch of bugfixes and improvements.

May 19, 2013: version 2.6 adds support for showing the currently playing media in Skype's mood message and fixes some stability issues that were uncovered after the release of version 2.5.

This post has been edited by Tim De Baets: May 19 2013, 16:42

[coffretmugs]

Feature suggestion: Album Shuffle.

I think it's pretty cool to shuffle albums instead of tracks. Shuffling the current view (i.e. search results, categories) would also be pretty awesome instead of shuffling the entire library.

I've tried looking around for this functionality, and the closest one I found was this: http://ablumshufflewmp.sourceforge.net/ -- Yes, it's a typo. However, the project seems to be stagnant. The project page doesn't even have clear instructions on how to use it.