Welcome to the Song Signature Plugin PowerToy for Windows Media Player 10.

This is an unsupported PowerToy designed to enhance your community networking when using Windows Media Player alongside Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express.

To use these files with Outlook 2003 or Outlook Express, please read the corresponding sections of this Read Me file.

Contents of this file:

Use with Outlook 2003
  1. Open Outlook 2003
  2. Open Outlook's Tools:Options menu.
  3. Go to the Mail Format tab.
  4. Go to the Signatures list.
  5. Select "MPSongSignature" for whatever profiles you'd like to use it with.
Now, next time you are playing music in Windows Media Player and send out a mail, your friend will be able to understand what music you were listening to while writing that mail.

Use with Outlook Express
  1. Open Outlook Express
  2. Open Outlook Express's Tools:Options menu.
  3. Go to the Signatures tab.
  4. Select "MPSongSignature".
Now, next time you are playing music in Windows Media Player and send out a mail, your friend will be able to understand what music you were listening to while writing that mail.

Configuration

 This PowerToy has certain options you can set. To access these options:
  1. Open Windows Media Player 10.
  2. Open Windows Media Player's Tools:Options menu.
  3. Go to the Plug-ins tab.
  4. Select the Background category.
  5. Select "Song Signature Plugin".
  6. Click Properties.
In this dialog, you have three sets of options for configuration.

First, you can set the general properties of the signature file that the plugin generates. If you only wish to share information about audio files that you play, you will wish to uncheck "Display metadata for video files". The "Text to prepend to signature" edit box lets you set what text your generated signature will being with. By default this value is "Now Playing:". You can set this to other values as you desire.

The second and third set of options are virtually identical. You can turn plug-in generation on or off for Outlook and/or Outlook Express. You can include appropriate text based upon your established rating of a file. You can also have the Song Signature plugin append the Now Playing information to an existing signature, which we will call a "file template". You can set the file template that the plugin should use by either entering the pathname in the supplied edit box or by using the "..." button to select the appropriate existing signature file to use to append to.

Note that it is preferred that you use a text signature file to append to. The plugin should also support appending to HTML signature files, but will not append to RTF signature files.

Blogging functionality

 This plugin includes the functionality previously contained in the Blogging plug-in from the Windows Media Player 9 Series Fun Pack. Documentation on how to use this functionality can be found here.

Additional information

 The resulting signature files are stored in %userprofile%\application data\microsoft\signatures. This would be useful information if you wished to use the signature files in other applications.

If you wish to customize the text used to describe Ratings, go to or create the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\UIPlugins\{51EB565B-89F1-4EB8-881F-CC1ACEA33E7C}\Settings. Under this registry key you may create and set the registry value names "Text1Star", "Text2Star", "Text3Star", "Text4Star", and/or "Text5Star". The text of these entries will then be used for the corresponding rating description.

Created by Zach Robinson of the Windows Media Development Team. Special thanks to Chris Lanier and the other Windows Media MVPs.