Now Playing (XML)

A very minimal "Now Playing" XML generating plugin for Windows Media Player.

Introduction

The motivation for writing this plugin was quite simple, a very simple python script[1] for updating the current music track that you are listening to in your media player to an IRC channel was developed by a Rajiv. Originally the script was written for Linux for Amarok based back-end and later on extended for a mpd based back-end, but since I hang around Windows machines a lot I thought of extending the original script to work with Windows Media Player (WMP).

In order for the python script to read the data from WMP it needed to retrieve data on the fly from it and since I did not find a direct way to do it, I looked around for a plugin that could generate the current track data in some sort of XML format from WMP and the nearest solution was a paid plugin[2] for WMP. I decided to write a simple WMP plugin using the tools available for free within the Windows 7 Development framework that would get the job done without any restrictions imposed on me by this paid plugin.

A special thanks to the Last.fm scrobbling application[3] hosted in github, that helped me understand and implement the WMP SDK from the Windows 7 SDK framework.

How to compile

Before doing a proper compile make sure you have the following items installed and ready to go in your system.

• Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition (or higher)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Express Edition SP1
• Windows 7 Software Development Kit
• Windows 7 Driver Development Kit

The total installed size of all the components comes to roughly 2.0G+ in size.

Clone the repository open up the solution and compile.

• NOTE: You have to change the path to the atl71 and vc\include directory into your include and library paths to meet your path where you have installed.

• NOTE: You may have to include the atlthunk.lib manually into the Linker -> Input area of your VC++ project properties.

In order to make the plugin active execute the following command on the dll after compilation is done

regsvr32 /s "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\Plugins\now_playing_xml.dll"

How it works

Currently it creates a file in D:\ Drive (because I hard-coded it), that contains the following items in an XML format.

• Track Name
• Album Name
• Artist Name
• Player State (e.g. paused, stopped, playing)

The XML structure is as follows.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<now_playing_track>
  <title>Some Title/title>
  <artist>Some Artist</artist>
  <album>Some Album</album>
  <player_state>playing</player_state>
</now_playing_track>

TODO

1. Make the path of the output file more configurable.
2. Provide a better XML parsing library.

References

• [1] - https://github.com/fraggerfox/music_bot
• [2] - http://brandon.fuller.name/archives/2004/09/14/11.05.20/
• [3] - https://github.com/lastfm/lastfm-desktop/blob/master/plugins/wmp