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Introduction

Win7shell is a simple plugin for Winamp, that integrates it with the new taskbar of Windows 7. As you may know the taskbar offers lots of new features, which you can read about everywhere, including here. Why would you need this? The new taskbar features were designed to improve the convenience of the user, adding visible information and shortcuts where you need it, but Winamp doesn't take advantage of these. Until now.

Features

The plugin's features, briefly:

• shows playback status and progress in the icon background of the taskbar icon
• uses taskbar icon to display a "VU meter"
• shows playback status using icon overlays on the taskbar icon
• customizes the aero peek thumbnail with:
• Winamp logo
• album art
• customized information about the current media playing
• custom image file
• progress bar, showing playback progress
• adds customizable player control buttons on the aero peek thumbnail
• adds 'Recent', 'Frequent' and 'Tasks' categories to the jump list
• Winamp is now easier to find in 3DFlip

Scroll down to view details and screen shots

Compatibility and convenience:

• translation support (Unicode and rigth-to-left support)
• fully compatible with Winamp and Windows 7
• all features can be turned on and off
• thumbnail information is selected and customized by user
• full UNICODE support
• comfortable installer :)

Screen Shots

Progress Bar

The progress bar in the taskbar icon background shows the position of the currently playing track. The different color can also indicate the status of the playback. Streaming media is shown as an "intermediate" state. You can also enable a feature that creates a tiny VU meter using this progressbar :)

• Playing local file - green progress bar
• Playing streaming media - green looping 'indeterminate' progress bar
• Playback paused - yellow progress bar
• Playback stopped - red icon

Icon Overlays

These little icons will be shown in the lower right corner of the taskbar icon. There are three different icon overlays: playing, paused and stopped. They can be used in combination with the progress bar.

• Playing
• Paused
• Stopped
• In combination with progress bar

Aero Peek

Thumbnail Image

The aero peek is the window that pops up when you hover your mouse over a taskbar icon, or when you click the taskbar icon of a window group. It usually displays a thumbnail of the window, but it doesn't work with the default Winamp, and even if it would, it would be useless. This plugin can change the thumbnail image to a user selected image, Winamp logo, album art taken from the current track or just a transparent, Windows 7 styled blurred background.

Optionally you can display any text on the selected image, and include information about the playing media with the help of metawords. The text supports Unicode characters, and can be drawn using user selected text font, text color, shadow color, and text anti alias.

The background image can be re-sized (stretched) according to the number of lines of text selected, and your current screen resolution. The background you selected can also be used as an icon on the left of the thumbnail, and add text to it on the right.

The album art feature reads the ID3v2 or APEv2 tag, and searches for picture frames. If there is none, the search for an album cover is performed as follows (only in the same folder with the current playing file):

1. checks for 'folder.jpg/gif/png'
2. checks for 'cover.jpg/gif/png'
3. checks for 'front.jpg/gif/png'
4. checks for '«album_name».jpg'
5. checks for 'albumartsmall.jpg'
6. checks for any image file that starts with 'albumart'
7. if no album art image was found, it defaults to the selected background

Supported image formats for custom background and album art: BMP, ICON, GIF, JPEG, Exif, PNG, TIFF, WMF, EMF. (Supports 32bpp alpha channel images, partial transparency)

- Default background -

- Custom background -

- Transparent background -

- Album art -

- Album art and text / iconic image -

Thumbnail Buttons

The thumbnail buttons can be added on the aero peek window, under the image. This plugin adds 4 buttons to control the playback of Winamp: previous, play, stop and next. The 'play' button gets replaced by a 'pause' button when Winamp is playing.

Jump List

The jump list is an interesting feature in Windows 7, however I didn't attempt to exploit it fully. Currently all the tracks played are added to the 'Recent' category of the list.

Settings Window

Here you can enable, disable or customize the plugin's features. The configuration window can be accessed from the Winamp Preferences -> Plug-ins -> General Purpose -> Windows 7 Taskbar Integration.

Translated Configuration Window

Full Taskbar View