Date

I'm a big fan of the Launchy keystroke launcher, and have used f0vela's iTuny plugin for controlling iTunes intermittently for a while. One thing that bugged me with iTuny was that the playlists always seemed to be in reverse track order. That is, if I asked iTuny to queue up everything from R.E.M.'s "Green", I'd end up with track 1 at the end of the playlist, and track 11 at the beginning. I suppose that's a bug in iTunes rather than iTuny, but since I couldn't find a way to get iTuny to re-sort the playlist by track number (AutoIT isn't a particularly full-featured language), I started looking for other options.

So I ended up updating my Winamp, which I had rarely used for music, and mostly for exploring sound effects from WoW addons or similar things. I shortly found ActiveWinamp which was originally intended to let Winamp control other programs as an ActiveX client, but later added features to make Winamp an ActiveX server, too. Add one night of cursing at VBScript and I've got Launchy controlling Winamp to my liking.

Download link at Dropbox. I've also got a post at the Launchy plugins forum for more feedback.

Installation:

Extract files into LaunchyUtilities and recatalog.

Features:

  • Playlist control: next track, previous track, pause, play, shuffle, stop
  • Playlist creation: by artist, album, track title, or year

Usage

"winamp control.vbs" (next|prev|pause|play|shuffle|stop|query) [arg1 [arg2...]]

next, prev, pause, play, shuffle and stop require no extra arguments.

query requires queryType and queryName arguments:

  • queryType: (album|artist|title|year)
  • queryName: word1 [word2...]

Query Examples:

  • artist Mojo
  • artist Rusted Root
  • album Tuesday Night Music Club
  • year 1994
  • title Elvis
  • title Brand New Day