Stop music files from playing automatically in viewer pane

Hi,

the subject says it all. How can I accomplish this? For movies I found a setting in the movie plugin but not for music files like mp3s.

Regards
xbprm

Go to Preferences / Viewer / Viewer Plugins, configure the ActiveX plugin and turn on the Windows Media Player Preview Handler.

(Ignore the warning that it displays about it being worse than the Generic ActiveX viewer; the main thing that makes it "worse" is what you actually want here.)

Thanks.

How about adding the same option about "not play automatically" like in Movie Plugin?

I'll look into that but most ActiveX controls, and all Preview Handlers, will ignore the autoplay flag so the option may confuse people unless it's made clear that it is just a suggestion to viewer.

Why keep the viewer open when you don't want to view/hear things? :slight_smile:

Thanks

I have the viewer pane always open to quickly identify/view things. This works fine except mp3 they always started to play and I had to manually stop them. This is extremely annoying as I also have some other music playing.

Did turning on the Windows Media Player Preview Handler solve the problem?

Yes. Sorry, forgot to confirm the solution.

This has always bugged me in the metadata pane, but not enough to mention it. (I assumed that there was a way around it and I was too thick to work it out.)

I always end up closing the player in the metadata pane, even though it could be useful to have it there.

You mean the viewer pane? The metadata pane shouldn't play audio.

This is what I mean:

The viewer bit at the top automatically plays files.

As I would not know how to configure that view, I assumed that this is the default behaviour. It is cut off here, but the full image shows what I mean.

You've got both the viewer and the metadata panels open there. It's the viewer, in the top half, which is playing the music.

If you do what I suggested above, and turn on the Windows Media Player Preview Handler, the viewer will no longer start playing music files automatically.

Huh. How did that happen?

As far as I can recall, I have always seen the viewer pane atop the metadata pane. I wouldn't know how to add it.

Now that you have pointed that out, I have removed the viewer pane and updated that tab.

It's the "Metadata" style that opened it (i.e. click the Metadata tab on your toolbar and it will come back), but that's just the default definition of the style. You can turn the metadata panel on or off like anything else, using the style isn't the only way.

I know this is old but I'm also trying to find a solution to this problem. I want all media to not play automatically. I would like to see pictures when I click on them, but all other media to not play automatically in the viewer pane. A simple option for this would be great... I have been wrestling with the plugins trying to get this how I want it.

Switching off the Movie plugin and telling the ActiveX+Preview+Office+Web plugin to send files to the Windows Media Player preview handler should work.

At least if the WMP preview handler is working; Microsoft broke it entirely in a Windows 10 update but I think it may work again in Opus (still broken in Explorer, last I checked, strangely).

Turning off the Active X plugin seems to have done it, but I'm hoping I didn't lose any other functionality in the viewer by doing that.

That wasn't in my suggestions. :slight_smile: If you turn off the entire plugin, you'll lose a lot of functionality.

If you just don't want music to play at all in the viewer pane, disable the specific formats/extensions within that plugin's configuration dialog, as well as the movie plugin.

If you want it to play but only when you click, try my suggestion above.

(Note that disabling the Movie plugin also reduces the amount of metadata available in the file display, although you can get similar data via the shell using this: Video length, dimensions, framerate, definition columns )

I would like to suggest a checkbox in the viewer pane options for "disable autoplay for all media files". I think it would be a lot easier for the end user if this were possible.