If you're putting together an Arcade cabinet or if you just like the ambience of an old arcade parlor while hacking away at some code, you might get a kick from Andy Hofle's Arcade Ambience project.

Basically, Andy took recordings of playing dozens of arcade machines, remixed them, adjusting volumes, pans, etc, and ended up with several, very large, mp3 tracks of background ambience that sounds very much like stepping into an old arcade. What's even better, the tracks are so large (at 70+mb each), they effectively don't loop, so you don't get that been there, heard that feeling that's typical of ambient tracks.

Couple that with an arcade front end that can play an arbitrary mp3 looped as background sounds, and couple that with a recent audio card that supports multiple simultaneous channels, and you get all the ambience of walking into an arcade while playing any emulator, Visual Pinball table, etc.

I'm finishing up my little Signature Enhancement Utility for Outlook and had finally gotten the Media Center 12 "Currently listening to" functions operational (This is just a minor feature I've seen popular on website blogs and forums, where the tag line contains not only the author's name but what they are currently listening to, if anything, nifty and fun, but not in the least practical).

I figured I'd go ahead and try to support Windows Media Player 11 (and hopefully earlier versions) as well.

Basically, the idea is to grab a reference to the running instance, interrogate it as to the "playing" state and, if it's playing or paused, retrieve the name, album, artist, etc info on the playing track and make it available as replaceable fields in the signature.

With Media Center, it was almost trivial:

Set omc = GetObject(, "MediaJukebox Application")
If not omc is nothing Then
   '---- it's running
   ' if it's not running, they can't be playing any music
   With omc
   Select Case .GetPlayback.State
      Case PLAYSTATE_PAUSED, PLAYSTATE_PLAYING
      '---- Media center info is available
      ps = .GetCurPlaylist.Position
      CurTrackTitle$ = .GetCurPlaylist.GetFile(ps).Name
      etc...

Obviously, if the GETOBJECT fails to return anything, Media Center isn't currently running so the user can't be listening to anything.

Three hours of Googling later, plus tons of experimentation and I'm not even an inch closer to getting this working for Media Player.

Using ROTView(the Running Object Table viewer, comes with various installations of Visual Studio), it does appear that WMP registers "something" with the ROT, which I'd think would be accessible by VB's GetObject().

Alas, "Windows Media Player", "WindowsMediaPlayer", "MediaPlayer.MediaPlayer", and on and on, all came up empty.

I scoured the registry for anything that even remotely looked like the moniker of a WMP registration with the ROT and everything I tried also came up empty. I'm sure it's another case of knowing the magic password, but so far, it appears to be a tad more involved than Speak, friend, and enter.

So, for now, looks like I'll have to rely on the FunPack for support of a limited set of attributes of the currently playing song in WMP. Apparently, for ITunes, you can use this plugin to accomplish the same thing, though I don't use ITunes and probably won't bother with testing that.

If anyone's ever had any success with accessing the running instance of Media Player, I'd love to hear about it!

I've used several different media players over time, but since stumbling across J River's Media Center, I haven't seen the need to use anything else.

It has an fast and flexible database, and it can tag multiple tracks very efficiently. Plus it looks great!

I really only have two negatives about it.

• I still can't get it to work right with my Tivo. When it DID work, it was great. But it quit at one point about a year ago, and I've never been able to get it to work since. Galleon, on the other hand, works great with Tivo, and has since I first installed it.
• The Next and Previous track keys on my MS Comfort Curve keyboard don't actually go to the next and previous tracks like they should when MC is minimized. The volume and pause keys work perfect though.

Ok, scratch that last negative. I posted a question to the MC forums and got some very helpful responses, which led me to the Media Center Wiki with this post about the command line options. Just use:

MC12.EXE /COMMAND /NEXT

or

MC12.EXE /COMMAND /PREVIOUS

and Viola! Next and previous work just fine, no matter whether MC is minimized to the systray or not.

Now, maybe someone has an idea about getting it to work with Tivo again. Anyone?