Current playing item in Windows Media Player (wmplayer.exe ver. 12)

Question

Been trying this for a while now. All solutions I've seen on the net don't seem to work, specially the really simple way to do it.

WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer c = new WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer();
IWMPMedia i = (IWMPMedia)c.currentMedia;

c.currentMedia is always null.

It seems that new WMPLib.WindowsMediaPlayer(); is always creating a new instance of the Windows Media Player. First I thought it was the fact that I was running visual studio as Administrator, but changing that did not help.

Seems I somehow have to connect to the running instance of wmplayer.exe but have unable to find a way to do that.

Btw. What I need is a full file url for the current playing song (or fullurl if streaming, but that's the least of my concerns now.)

Answer 1

Your question answered here.

1. A pretty straight way:

   Get a WMP9 plugin here that will put your current song name on the titlebar of the WMP window, and use FindWindow P/Invoke to get the window and get the song name. It shoud work, though a little tricky.

   Check here for more details.

   Windows Media Player 9 Series Blogging Plug-in

2. A much more complex way:

   Since your application and the WMP will be different processes, your scenario requires some kind of inter-process-communication (IPC). And .NET offers Remoting for this purpose.

   Below are some useful information:

   How to interact with Windows Media Player in C#

   Windows Media Player Remoting in C#

from SamAgain