Taskplay

Not all keyboards come with a special set of keys for controlling media playback, and many users would prefer not to have to bring up their media player whenever they wish to pause a song or skip to the next track.

Taskplay is an interesting application that adds a simple set of media controls right in the system tray, making it much easier to manage playback in multiple applications. It looks promising, but it only seems to support audio players at present.

The installation process is simple enough, and you will notice three new items in the Windows system tray when it is completed. These allow you to start or stop playback, as well as skip to the next or previous file.

You can change the order of these icons or hide the ones you don’t need, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to prevent one or two of them from showing up in the system tray altogether.

We found that Taskplay worked well with some well-known music players, such as foobar2000 and AIMP, and it also had no problems with Groove and Windows Media Player.

However, we were not able to control playback when using some popular video players, namely VLC Media Player, KMPlayer and SMPlayer. Of course, this shouldn’t be a major issue if you are just looking for a better way to control your music.

Taskplay isn’t as versatile as we would have liked at present, as it doesn’t seem to support a number of widely-used video players, although it does well when it comes to audio players.

If you don’t have a media keyboard or prefer not to use hotkeys for this purpose, this program could prove to be very useful.