Tim Anderson's ITWriting

January 5, 2005

Automating Windows Media Player

As a journalist, I tend to record numerous press briefings and interviews, and sometimes I have the arduous task of transcribing parts of them. Some time ago I shifted from minidisk to a hard disk MP3 player/recorder (my review is here). Generally this works very well, and I much prefer working with MP3 files than with stacks of little plastic disks that tend to disappear under piles of paper on the desk. So I load the file into Windows Media Player, open up Word, and switch between Word and WMP in order to control playback.

At least, I used to do this. I've been meaning for ages to see whether I could easily create some keyboard shortcuts in Word to control the player. Today I spent half an hour on this, and it turns out to be very easy. I've set a reference to the Windows Media Player OCX, and made shortcuts for Open, Pause, Play, Go back a bit, Go forward a bit, and Go to position (this one opens an input box). Mind you, I still can't find the documentation for the OCX in the Media Player SDK; I'm using the little help strings in the VBA object browser.

It's great, a big improvement over alt-tab. There are a few mysteries to solve when I get a moment. I've put the macros in Normal.dot; I think it may work better as a COM add-in since I want to keep a reference to the active media player object at the application level, not at the document level. Getting a bit more ambitious, it would be neat to display the current position in the status bar. And why stop at transcribing? Since I spend so much time in Word, how about some music playlists, paused at the touch of a key when the telephone rings?

All in all, it reminds me how much I like VBA in Office. It's amazing how much a few quick macros can improve your productivity.