While surfing the noise in FriendFeed tonight, I came upon a Jabber/GoogleTalk IM bot via IMified which then lead me to find another little GoogleTalk gem. Automatic current music track status updates compatible with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, and Yahoo Music Engine (?). Pretty sweet huh?
So I fired up my Winamp, version 5.531, and set my GoogleTalk status to “Current track” and watched.. it freeze. And freeze. And freeze. So I scanned Google and the Winamp forums for anything related to GoogleTalk’s miscommunication with Winamp. There’s an error in communication between GoogleTalk and Winamp 5.5 for some odd reason, perhaps someone with some programming knowledge can tell me.
Anyways, there’s a work-around for the error, so have no fear. Most people were recommending that you explore into Winamp’s directory and create an empty notepad file and save it as winamp.m3u but there is an easier and much quicker way, which the GoogleTalk Support page supplies.
Simply exit both GoogleTalk and Winamp, go to Start on your taskbar and select Run (windows key + R too!) and enter
type nul:>>"c:\progra~1\winamp\winamp.m3u"
Making sure you use two carets (>>) not one (>). Click OK.
Just make sure that you have administrator privileges before you try this, and depending on which type of windows you run, if you run x64 use progra~2 instead of progra~1.
[...] Miscommunication between GoogleTalk and Winamp :: Colby Olson – use Winamp? .. Use GTalk? .. finding they don’t play nice when you want GTalk to display the song playing as your GTalk status? Well Colby’s here to help ya all out. [...]
Thanks buddy, I had the same problem! Though I couldn’t execute that command. Instead, I closed Winamp, then opened GTalk, and changed my status (to Busy or Available), then reopened Winamp.
@Zim There’s another method as-well, that involves creating a blank file and naming it winamp.m3u and doing all that manually, but having the same effect in the end. Now that I’m on a mac though, GoogleTalk’s music status doesnt carry over too much. Thanks for the comment though, I really appreciate it.