Displays your currently playing track directly on the taskbar — with album art, an animated dual-color Chameleon background, media controls, and smooth native animations, all rendered efficiently with Direct2D.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| 🎨 Dual Chameleon Background | Extracts the dominant colors from the album art to create a glowing, dual-color animated gradient |
| 🖼️ Intelligent Album Art | Smooth crossfade transition when the track changes, featuring stale-cache detection and an automatic iTunes API Fallback when platforms like Spotify fail to provide thumbnail art |
| ⏯️ Media Controls | Previous, Play/Pause, Next with animated hover effects (Lerp) |
| 📊 Chameleon Progress Bar | A sleek progress bar that adapts its gradient to your album colors, featuring click-to-scrub support and a dynamic hover indicator |
| 🔊 Volume Scroll | Scroll your mouse wheel over the widget to control system volume |
| 🔀 Shuffle & Repeat Icons | Displays the current shuffle and repeat state of your media player |
| 💡 Smart Sleep & Performance | Automatically pauses all rendering when your PC goes to sleep or the taskbar auto-hides. Features split FPS rendering to save GPU cycles |
| 🌓 Auto Theme | Adapts text and background colors to Windows Light/Dark mode |
| 🖥️ Multi-monitor | Show the widget on your primary monitor or whichever has your mouse cursor |
| 🪟 Glass Effects | Choose between Solid, Blur, Acrylic, or Mica (Windows 11) backgrounds |
| ✏️ Fully Configurable | 38 customizable settings to tweak dimensions, colors, animations, and behavior to your liking |
Requires Windhawk to be installed.
- Open Windhawk
- Go to Explore and search for
Now Playing - Click Install
- Done! The widget will appear on your taskbar automatically.
- Download WidgetMusic.cpp from this repository
- Open Windhawk → Create a new mod
- Paste the entire source code
- Click Compile & Run
💡 Note: If a setting doesn't apply immediately after saving, just disable and re-enable the mod to force a refresh.
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hide When No Media | ✅ On | Hides the widget when nothing is playing |
| Hide in Fullscreen | ✅ On | Hides when an app is in fullscreen (e.g. games) |
| Auto-Hide on Pause | 0 (off) | Hides after X seconds of being paused |
| Click to Open App | ✅ On | Clicking the widget opens the media player |
| Click to Pause/Play | ❌ Off | Use click to toggle playback instead |
| Enable Volume Scroll | ✅ On | Scroll over the widget to adjust system volume |
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Panel Width | 300px | Total width of the widget |
| Panel Height | 48px | Height of the widget |
| Horizontal Position | 80px | Distance from the left edge of the taskbar |
| Vertical Position | 0px | Vertical offset from taskbar center |
| Font Size | 13 | Size of the track/artist text |
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Glass Effect | Blur | Solid / Blur / Acrylic / Mica |
| Background Tint Color | 000000 |
Hex color for the background tint |
| Background Opacity | 0 | Opacity of the tint (0–255) |
| Follow System Theme | ✅ On | Auto-switches between light and dark |
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Enable Chameleon | ✅ On | Glowing gradient based on album art color |
| Dual Chameleon Effect | ✅ On | Extracts two contrasting colors to create a gradient. When off, fades one color into transparency |
| Chameleon Color Vibrancy | 50 | Adjusts the saturation of the extracted colors (0 = grayscale, 200 = oversaturated) |
| Chameleon Intensity | 175 | Strength of the base glow (0–255) |
| Animate Chameleon | ✅ On | Breathing pulse animation while playing |
| Chameleon Animation Distance | 20 | How far the gradient colors shift left and right during the animation |
| Glow from Right Side | ❌ Off | Left or right side gradient origin |
| Smooth Color Transition | ✅ On | Crossfade between colors on track change |
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Button Scale | 1.0 | Size multiplier for media buttons |
| Hover Fade Speed | 15 | Speed of button hover animation |
| Show Shuffle/Repeat Icons | ✅ On | Show small icons for shuffle/repeat state |
| Show Progress Bar | ✅ On | Display the progress bar at the bottom |
| Chameleon Progress Bar | ❌ Off | Progress bar uses the album art colors as a gradient instead of a fixed color |
| Progress Bar Color | 1DB954 |
Hex color for solid progress bar (ignored if Chameleon is enabled) |
| Progress Bar Scrubbing | ✅ On | Click progress bar to seek |
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Text Scroll Speed | 1 | How fast text scrolls (0 = disabled) |
| Text Scroll Pause | 150 | Frames to pause before scrolling repeats |
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Target Taskbar Monitor | Primary | Show on Primary monitor or active mouse cursor |
| Fade In/Out Animation | ✅ On | Smooth fade in/out when showing/hiding |
| Animation FPS | 60 | Global target frames per second (10–144) |
| Progress Bar FPS | 30 | Target FPS exclusively for the progress bar. Set to 1 to tick every second and save maximum GPU |
The widget is a Windhawk mod that runs inside explorer.exe. It uses:
- WinRT
GlobalSystemMediaTransportControls— to read the currently playing media from any app (Spotify, YouTube Music, browser, etc.) - Direct2D & DirectWrite — for all rendering (hardware accelerated, smooth 60fps)
- Windows Imaging Component (WIC) — for decoding and accurately scaling album art
- Windows Web Services (WinINet) — to rapidly fetch high-res fallback album art from the iTunes API
- DWM APIs — for glass/blur/Mica/Acrylic backgrounds
- SetWindowsHookEx (WH_MOUSE_LL) — on a dedicated thread for responsive volume scroll
- WM_POWERBROADCAST — to detect sleep/wake and safely handle COM object recreation
| OS | Windows 11 (recommended), Windows 10 |
| Glass effects | Mica & Acrylic require Windows 11 |
| Media players | Any app that reports to Windows Media Session (Spotify, YouTube Music, VLC, browsers, etc.) |
| Windhawk | Required — download here |
Originally inspired by and forked from Taskbar Music Lounge by Hashah2311.
The codebase has since been heavily rewritten and extended with new UI designs, a full Direct2D rendering pipeline, dedicated hook threading, crossfade animations, advanced WIC image processing, fallback network requests, and a completely redesigned settings page.
This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.
Made with ❤️ by eliwulfy