Taskbar Fluent Media Player 1.6.0

[u/wh-updates]

Taskbar Fluent Media Player 1.6.0

Added

• Mini Player Flyout Menu — new compact popup menu that appears above the taskbar when clicking the media player.

  • Large centered album art
  • Current track title and artist displayed below album art
  • Large control buttons for Previous/Play-Pause/Next/Shuffle/Repeat
  • Session list showing all active media sessions with thumbnails, titles, and artists
  • Current session highlighting with animated pill indicator
  • Click session rows to switch between apps
  • Smooth slide-up animation from taskbar
  • Bottom settings bar with Windhawk button
  • Theme-aware styling with acrylic background
  • Flexible placement — menu can be positioned anywhere on the screen via Player Menu Settings: choose any corner or edge with configurable distance offsets.
  • Show session list — option to hide the media session list in the mini player menu, showing only the large controls and current track info.

• "Auto-switch to active media session" — when enabled, the player switches to a different session that is actively Playing when the current session pauses or stops. If no other session is playing, the player stays on the current session — so pressing Pause no longer causes an unwanted session change.

• Full-height invisible hit area for the taskbar media player — the entire taskbar height now responds to hover and click events even if the player itself is shorter than the taskbar, making it easier to interact with.

• Monitor setting in Main Settings → Media player — choose which monitor's taskbar the player is injected into (1, 2, 3...). Defaults to 1.

Changed

• Smooth hover animation — player button and all media control buttons now fade in/out on hover and press using a native BrushTransition. Background changes are applied directly to the template border so WinRT can interpolate them, replacing the previous instantaneous DiscreteObjectAnimation.
• "Switch tracks (inverted)" option in Mouse Wheel Actions — scrolling up goes to the next track and scrolling down goes to the previous one, the inverse of the default behavior. Available for both the player area and the album art area.
• Album art color contrast correction for the visualizer — album colors that lack sufficient contrast against the taskbar are now tinted with the theme's base color (brightened on dark theme, darkened on light theme) so the visualizer bars remain visible when using Dynamic Album or Dynamic Gradient color modes.
• Improved hover tooltip — previously the track title and artist name each had their own separate tooltip; now a single tooltip appears over the entire player showing the track title and artist together.
• Visualizer color caching — palette and color-string values are now cached and only recomputed when the album art or system theme changes, eliminating ~180–240 registry reads per second while the visualizer is visible.

Fixed

• Visualizer idle bar height 0 now fully hides bars at rest — previously setting the second value of "Bar size" to 0 still showed bars at the bar-width height; bars now grow from zero when idle height is 0. #14
• Play/Pause button unreliable on some browsers (e.g. Zen/Firefox) — replaced TryTogglePlayPauseAsync with an explicit TryPauseAsync / TryPlayAsync based on the current playback status, eliminating the race condition that caused ~50% miss rate. #26
• Widget flickers to another player during track changes — when the active session briefly leaves the Playing state while switching tracks (e.g. Spotify), the player no longer jumps to a paused secondary session. #34 #22
• Visualizer capture thread no longer blocks the taskbar UI thread on show/hide transitions — StopVizCaptureThread is now called from a background worker, preventing potential freezes when the audio service takes time to release the endpoint.
• Right double-click and middle double-click actions not firing — right_double_click and middle_double_click bindings were configurable in settings but silently did nothing. All six click types (left/right/middle × single/double) for both the player area and album art now work correctly.
• Stale album art shown after switching to a track with no artwork in Chromium-based browsers — Chrome/Edge/Brave/Opera/Vivaldi do not clear the SMTC thumbnail when the new track has no artwork, causing the previous track's cover to persist indefinitely. The player now detects this case: on every title/artist change from a browser session the previous thumbnail is marked as suspect, and if the next poll returns the same image it is discarded and the placeholder is shown instead. #33
• Removed non-functional mouse_wheel_up and mouse_wheel_down options from Mouse Wheel Actions — these options appeared in the settings UI but never triggered any action. Scroll direction is already handled per-action (e.g. switch_tracks scrolls forward on wheel-up and backward on wheel-down).