A customizable Now Playing plugin for Winamp, Foobar2000 and YME to show the current song as your "Now Playing" personal status message for Live Messenger. Gives you the "What I'm Listening To" functionality for Winamp and Foobar2000 so people you are chatting to on IM can see what you're listening to. Compatible with Winamp v2.x and Winamp 5 for use with MSN Messenger or MS Live Messenger. Use this version if you require compatibility with Winamp 2.x or do not use the notification component of Toaster.

This "Now Playing" plugin has full ATF support and support for Internet Radio streams. This means you have flexible control over exactly how the titles are displayed. You can even display ratings and playcount information in the titles, or any other information. It also has support for not updating the titles when playing videos through Winamp for privacy reasons. The default installation should satisfy most users, but the ability is there to configure it how you want.

See the documentation to Toaster for the available formatting tags for the Winamp version


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Download (v0.31) for Winamp for Windows Live Messenger. Now with Unicode support.
Download (v2.2) for Foobar2000 0.8 ie. foo_msn (source code)
Download foo_msnalt, a modified version of foo_msn, updated for Foobar2000 v0.9
Download for Yahoo! Music Engine YME (v0.1)
Download YMEWLMNowPlaying, modified version for Yahoo! Music Engine

FAQ:

Is it compatible with Live Messenger 8?
Yes, gen_msn works with both MSN Messenger 7.x and the newer Windows Live Messenger 8.

How do I swap the artist and title?
In Winamp or foobar2000 preferences, under "Live Messenger", change the Formatting from {0} - {1} to {1} - {0}. For WLM v8 build 0562 you will need to swap the fields themselves for artist and title (ie. put %title% in the artist field etc).

How can I get it to work without the latest version of Windows Media Player installed?
If you do not have a recent installation of WMP, and when you try to enable the "What I'm Listening To" feature of Messenger, you may get an error stating that it is required. You will need to 'trick' Messenger into thinking that you have a recent copy of WMP installed. You can try merging one of these registry files (enable_msn_psm or for '98 enable_msn_psm_98). Note that you should only do this if you know what you are doing and don't mind mucking with your WMP registry entries.

Is Unicode supported under Winamp?
Version 0.3+ of gen_msn supports Unicode with Winamp 5.33+.