If you use Windows Media Player (WMP) to listen to your MP3 tracks then here’s a neat little feature that you might have overlooked. Right-click on the Windows taskbar select Toolbars then Windows Media Player. That’s all there is to it and the next time you open WMP just click the Minimize button and a small control panel, also known as ‘Mini Mode’ appears docked onto the taskbar.

Here’s a bonus tip for WMP 11 users, available for download now and included with Windows Vista. This sets WMP to always open in Mini Player mode when you click on an mp3 file. Go to Now Playing > More Options and select the Player tab. Check the item ‘Start the mini player for file names…’ and in the box below replace the default text (voiceatt.wav – for automatically opening voicemail attachments) with ‘.mp3 (without the quotes). You can also set it to open when you click on files in a particular folder. For example, if all of your MP3s are stored in a folder called Music on the C: drive, just put ‘C:\music’ in the box.

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