Play song/mp3 at Windows Startup

I was asked a question by my bro Yuvy which I found a bit unusual.

It was a simple question:

How to play a song at the Windows startup?

Well I knew the answer to that and so did he already - the simple task of changing the sound in the sound preferences in the windows control panel. But as we know that has limitations with regards to the length and the sound quality - 30 seconds and 16 bit PCM i believe.

So what are the other options?

Simply putting the song in the Startup folder will work but that would still be slow depending on the default audio player.

So now you would need to use a faster loading audio player. But what if you do not want to change your default player?

This post aims to be a comprehensive guide towards achieving this, so bear with me if it seems to take time to explain things which you may find unnecessary.

My first step was to find an adequate audio player for the job. It would have to load extremely fast and thus be very lightweight.

After considering various players such as Foobar2000 and Evilplayer and even Winamp, I settled on XMPlay from Un4seen developments.

There's a menu to the left of the site where you can brows to XMPlay and download it. It is a stand alone application, for Windows only (at the time of writi

ng) which is fine for our purposes. 

The unzipped folder is oly 361KB.

In my case I decided to place the folder straight into the... um... C drive (or whatever your Windows drive is) so I am less likely to delete it.

Now it is simply a matter of getting it to start playing your chosen song at startup.

Navigate to your startup folder. This is usually found in C:\Documents and Settings\S\Start Menu\Programs\Startup where in my case S is the user name. You may already have shortcuts there, in my case Pidgin.

In the startup folder you right-click inside the window and select New the Sortcut as illustrated.

You will then see the Create Shortcut Wizard as follows:

Click on Browse and browse to the folder where XMPlayer is contained in my case C:\xmplayer34.

And double click on the xmplayer executable as shown opposite:

The Sortcut Wizard will now be as follows:

Click Next and give your shortcut a name as shown below:

Now click Finish and you will be presented with the Starup Folder with the shortcut as below:

All we have done so far is to create a shortcut which will launch XMPlay at startup.

We must now modify the shortcut to make it play the song desired when it launches.

Also I will add the -tray and -boost options to the shortcut.

The -tray option will launch XMPlay minimised to the system tray while the -boost option is used to set the XMPlay process priority to high allowing it to load faster.

To do this we right click on the Shortcut and select Properties as shown:

This will bring up the properties window as below:

We will only be working with the Target box.

The Target box currently displays : C:\xmplay34\xmplay.exe

We need to modify this as follows:

First we place the current target inside quote marks as such: "C:\xmplay34\xmplay.exe"

Next we add the tray and boost parameters so the target looks like this:

"C:\xmplay34\xmplay.exe" - tray -boost

also illustrated below:

Now we need to add the song to be played to the Target. This comes after the boost option and is also place in quotation marks. For example the song is called song.mp3 and is inside My Music Folder inside My Documents, the song location is:

"C:\Documents and Settings\S\My Documents\My Music\song.mp3"

Now the Target Box will contain:

"C:\xmplay34\xmplay.exe" - tray -boost "C:\Documents and Settings\S\My Documents\My Music\song.mp3"

You can also add multiple songs to be played by adding the song locations inside quotation marks after the first song location:

"C:\xmplay34\xmplay.exe" - tray -boost "C:\Documents and Settings\S\My Documents\My Music\song.mp3" "C:\Documents and Settings\S\My Documents\My Music\another_song.mp3"

It is also possible to use this same method to make XMPlay to open/play all supported audio(by the player)  inside a folder, for example  as follows:

"C:\xmplay34\xmplay.exe" - tray -boost "C:\Documents and Settings\S\My Documents\My Music"

Whereupon it will add all supported audio inside My Music to its playlist and start playing in alphabetical order.

You can also do this for supported media streams, see http://support.xmplay.com/.

Note that it is not necessary to add the Tray option, which I prefered as it is less obvious.Note also that it is not strictly necessary to inlcude the quotation marks for the player location. It is also not necessary to include them for the song/folder location. If they are not included for the song/folder location this would mean the player will launch but the audio will not startplaying and you would have to click play manually. I prefer to have the quotation marks there for neatness.

XMPlayer also has many skins available from http://support.xmplay.com/.

On my laptop (Core2Duo, 2GB ram), it takes 30 seconds after the Windows sound for the mp3 to start playing which seemed slow to me. Then again I have a lot of stuff in the registry set to start up a the same time, some of which are hogs... Hopefully it will be faster for most people. I guess there are many ways to make this load faster including modifying the registry but I will not go into this as I deem it unnecessary and overcomplicates the issue. The aim has been achieved and in my opinion it is as required.

Also XMPlayer is a great stand alone player. Really fast load and great sound. So much so that I have now set it as my default audio player.

This is, in my opinion, the best solution to this problem without making large changes. Unless somebody can come up with an easy way to change the Windows Startup Scheme sound to play a full length mp3. If this is possible, let me know.