Getting the current playing song from windows media player with Python

Question

For a program I'm writing, I need to get the current playing song from windows media player.

I've googled around a lot, but everything I found was about playing music VIA windows media player and getting information from that.

What I specifically want, someone has WMP open, and he has a song playing. I need to get the name of that song.

I've tried:

import win32com.client
wmp = win32com.client.gencache.EnsureDispatch('WMPlayer.OCX')

However, this doesn't control or do anything with the currently opened WMP instance.

I've also found something about using wmp.dll with ctypes, but I have no idea where to look or what to do with it. Related-source.

Can anyone shed some light on this? There were some other SO posts about the same question, but they don't really help me out.

I'm also trying but this seems to only create a new WMP instance without any GUI, unrelated with the main WMP intance already running. — Epoc, Mar 30 '17 at 12:04

alex yu · Answer 1 · 2019-03-31T08:52:24.667

# start a normal play
from win32com.client import Dispatch
mp = Dispatch("WMPlayer.OCX")
tune = mp.newMedia("path of your mp3 or wav file")
mp.currentPlaylist.appendItem(tune)
mp.controls.play()
mp.controls.playItem(tune)


#play at a different rate eg 5x speed
from win32com.client import Dispatch
mp = Dispatch("WMPlayer.OCX")
tune = mp.newMedia("path of your mp3 or wav file")
mp.currentPlaylist.appendItem(tune)
mp.controls.play()
mp.settings.rate = 5
mp.controls.playItem(tune)


# pause , fastforward
from win32com.client import Dispatch
import time
mp = Dispatch("WMPlayer.OCX")
tune = mp.newMedia("path of your mp3 or wav file")
mp.currentPlaylist.appendItem(tune)
mp.controls.play()
mp.settings.rate = 1
mp.controls.playItem(tune)
time.sleep(5)
mp.controls.fastForward()
mp.controls.play()
time.sleep(5)
mp.controls.pause()
mp.controls.play()


# get some basic information from audio
mp.controls.currentPosition         # 19.2683872  a float represent seconds
mp.controls.currentPositionString   # '00:22'     a string
mp.controls.currentPositionTimecode   # eg "[00000]00:05:50.00" meaning 0 hr 5 mins 50 sec
mp.currentMedia.durationString       # length of audio in string
mp.currentMedia.duration            # length of audio in float

for checking the audio name and other methods , you may want to check the official website that u posted, the usage will be similar.

for reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/wmp/controls-object https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/wmp/media-name

the code u need may be this:

 audio_name = mp.currentMedia.name

or this

 audio_name = mp.currentMedia.name()

Good Luck!

Getting the current playing song from windows media player with Python

1 Answers1