WMP - Random Playlist Short-Cut

WMP = Windows Media Player by the way.

The story, With my holiday at home, I listen to music more often and play songs at random from my collection. I usually use MPC (Media Player Classics) for single mp3 playback as it consumes less computing resources. For lots of songs and random playing I need to use WMP as it has that ability. Today i developed a way to speed up the process of me opening WMP and playing my songs at random.
I usually open my music folder (I have short cuts in Start menu) and right click on one of my songs and click "Play with media player" as the default launch program is MPC. I would then go to library and in the search box type "eastern" as i have organised my music in eastern (asian music) and western (english music) and non-vocal music. I would then have to click one of the songs in the search results and play it and then all the search results songs (ie asian music) would be loaded into the now playing list and random song selection would be performed.

The methods, read the above paragraph first, I was going to divide the method and story apart but i have mentioned what the long way is in the story and to make the short-cut you need to perform the long way first.

Note: My scenario is assuming you divide your music into folders if not, just load your library and play any song you like.


First,
Do the long way and play a song from the search results or just your library so songs load in the now playing playlist (the right hand side column)


Set playing to random,
In WMP > Play > Shuffle (Ctrl+H)

Save Play List,
In WMP > File > Save Now Playing List As > (Type in file name and save to desktop)


The result, now your music is just one click away and you've got your ipod shuffle on your PC! If you don't like shuffle music you can always uncheck Shuffle and just have your music playlist on your desktop to speed up finding a song or clicking the WMP icon to start up WMP.

More tips,
If you don't like the song in shuffle you can always use the next song button on your keyboard or in WMP to skip to next random song. The button likes something like this (>>|) = Next song . (|<<) = Last played song