Windows Media Player is a great tool for organizing and playing your media files, but it can be a bit of a hassle to have to open it manually each time you want to use its Mini Player mode. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make Windows Media Player automatically open in Mini Player mode whenever you start it up. To do this, open the Windows Media Player settings by clicking the gear icon in the top left corner of the window, and then clicking the “Settings” button. Under “General,” click on the “Open in Mini Player” option. In the “When opening:” dropdown menu, select “Always.” Click OK to save your changes and close the settings window. Now, whenever you start up Windows Media Player, it will automatically open in Mini Player mode. You can still use regular windows if you want, or you can use mini player mode if you’re on a small screen device like a phone or tablet. ..
To set this option, go to the Options page (linked off the Now Playing button) and look at the first tab, which should be “Player”.
You’ll see a textbox titled “Start the mini Player for file names that contain this text”. The default value in this field is “voiceatt.wav”, obviously designed to use the mini mode for voicemail attachments.
If you want to make all mp3 files open in the mini player, just type .mp3 into the window:
Or if you have all your music stored on a single drive like I do, you can type the drive letter, or even the folder path to your music collection:
If you want every single file to always open in the mini player, just type a single colon : character into the field. This doesn’t work quite as well for videos, though…
Now when you double-click on a file in Windows Explorer, it will open in the mini player by default. On to the screenshots!
Windows Media Player 11 on XP (Mini mode)
Windows Media Player 11 on Vista (Mini mode)
The Vista version is definitely cool with the transparency, but I almost like the XP version better.
