Getting Currently Playing Song in Windows Media Player 12

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Introduction

Windows Media Player is a commonly used application for playing media files. Many users on the Internet were unsuccessfully trying to obtain currently playing song information, including me. In most cases, they used WMPLib which is unfortunately not fully compatible with newer versions of Windows Media Player. So I decided to solve this problem in the other way.

Background

I tried to solve this problem only for my personal use and the following code may differ from the complete UI independent solution (but it works :)).

For obtaining content from components inside Windows, we have to add a reference to UIAutomationClient.dll and not run application in Single Thread Apartment (STA) State.

At last, we’ve got to have open Windows Media Player in library mode and open the Play card:

Code Description

First, we need to find Windows Media Player Window via FindWindow function included in User32.dll. We need to know which window we are looking for so we can use Spy++ to determine strWindowName and strClassName parameters.

When we have the Windows Media Player window handle, we can walk through the component tree until we find the CWmpControlCntr component and iterate though its children to obtain all desired information.

Code

public class WMPSongInfo  
{
    [DllImport("User32.dll")]
    private static extern IntPtr FindWindow(string strClassName, string strWindowName);

    public WMPSong GetCurrentPlayingSong()
    {
        // Checking Thread Apartment State
        ApartmentState state = Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState();
        if (state == ApartmentState.STA)
            throw new InvalidOperationException
            ("You cannot be in Single Thread Apartment (STA) State.");

        // Finding the WMP window
        IntPtr handle = FindWindow("WMPlayerApp", "Windows Media Player");
        if (handle == IntPtr.Zero)
            throw new InvalidOperationException("Windows Media Player window not found.");

        TreeWalker walker = TreeWalker.ControlViewWalker;
        // Whole WMP window
        AutomationElement wmpPlayer = AutomationElement.FromHandle(handle);
        AutomationElement wmpAppHost = walker.GetFirstChild(wmpPlayer);
        AutomationElement wmpSkinHost = walker.GetFirstChild(wmpAppHost);
        // All elements in WMP window
        AutomationElement wmpContainer = walker.GetFirstChild(wmpSkinHost);
        // Container with song information
        AutomationElement wmpSongInfo = walker.GetFirstChild(wmpContainer);

        if (wmpSongInfo == null)
            throw new InvalidOperationException("Unable to find CWMPControlCntr 
            in Windows Media Player Window. Try to switch to full view.");

        // Iterating through all components in container - searching for container with song information
        while (wmpSongInfo.Current.ClassName != "CWmpControlCntr")
        {
            wmpSongInfo = walker.GetNextSibling(wmpSongInfo);

            if (wmpSongInfo == null)
                break;
        }

        // Walking through children (image, hyperlink, song info etc.)
        List<AutomationElement> info = GetChildren(wmpSongInfo);
        info = GetChildren(info[0]);
        info = GetChildren(info[1]);
        info = GetChildren(info[2]);

        // Obtaining elements with desired information
        AutomationElement songE = info[0];
        AutomationElement albumE = info[3];
        AutomationElement artistE = info[4];

        string name = songE.Current.Name;
        string album = albumE.Current.Name;
        string artist = artistE.Current.Name;

        return new WMPSong(name, album, artist);
    }

    // Returns all child AutomationElement nodes in "element" node
    private List<AutomationElement> GetChildren(AutomationElement element)
    {
        List<AutomationElement> result = new List<AutomationElement>();
        TreeWalker walker = TreeWalker.ControlViewWalker;
        AutomationElement child = walker.GetFirstChild(element);
        result.Add(child);

        while (child != null)
        {
            child = walker.GetNextSibling(child);
            result.Add(child);
        }

        return result;
    }
}

Using the Code

We can simply add the WMPSongInfo.cs file to our project and then we can use it:

WMPSongInfo info = new WMPSongInfo();
WMPSong song = info.GetCurrentPlayingSong();
Console.WriteLine("{0} - {1} ({2})", song.Name, song.Artist, song.Album);

Notes

As I mentioned, this code is designed only for Windows Media Player opened in library mode with opened Play card so if you have a better solution, I would appreciate it.