How to interact with Windows Media Player in C#

Question

I am looking for a way to interact with a standalone full version of Windows Media Player.
Mostly I need to know the Path of the currently played track.

The iTun

Answer 1

The best info I have seen on interacting with Windows Media Player is this article written by Stephen Toub.

He lists a whole load of different ways to play dvr-ms files (doesn't really matter what format they are for this though). The bit that is possibly of interest to you is about using a Media Player ActiveX Control, which you can add to the visual Studio toolbox by right-clicking and adding the Windows Media Player ActiveX COM Control. You can then embed the player into your app, and access various properties of Media Player, like the url:

WMPplayer.URL = stringPathToFile;

This solution is possibly not what you want because it's starting a new instance of Media Player (as far as I know), however it might point you in the right direction.