Yesterday I discovered a Windows 7 gadget that I had been wishing for months someone would write. It turns out that it has been around since 2007, I’d just not found it yet.
The gadget is called Now Playing – With Lyrics by Lawrence and it shows in a small window the song you are currently listening to, including album art and, on hover, track details and player controls:
Compatible media players
The gadget works with a number of media players:
- Windows Media Player
- iTunes
- Winamp
- foobar2000
- Quintessential Media Player (qmp)
- MediaMonkey
- Audioscrobbler
using custom plugins, but it would appear that the website where the plugins were all hosted has been taken down and so on first-run the gadget now returns an error.
Plugins
This is the point where I uninstalled the gadget the first time I looked at it a few months ago. This time I went to investigate and discovered that they’ve been moved to this basic site: Now Playing plugins.
Once downloaded, and with the gadget installed, place them in this Windows folder:
%HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\nowplaying.gadget\plugins
Then open your media player and click on the gadget. When I did that with Winamp 5.61 I was prompted to install the plugin. And then, as if by magic, I could see the album art in the gadget.
It’s really handy to, at a glance, see what track/album/artist is currently playing. I wish I’d found this before.
Since Microsoft have taken down the gadget gallery, I’ve had some folks asking me where they can download the gadget. So I’ve uploaded it here:
Download gadget and plugins (2.85 MB)