What does Windows 7 have to do with music? Nothing, really. But I’ve noticed that no one has been enterprising enough to put the Window 7 taskbar features to REALLY good use and make an mp3 player that we can use while we work (WMP team, are you listening?). I mean, who doesn’t listen to music while working? Everyone who raised their hands can leave the room now. Just kidding.

Onto the good stuff. Lyre sits in your taskbar, updates the application icon with the album art (if present), shows play progress on the taskbar button and provides all the basic play controls as thumb-buttons on the taskbar. There are no visualizations yet, but they should be easy enough to do if there’s enough demand for it. Here are some screenshots:

Here’s the player with controls, progress and tag-reading.

You can control the player by using it’s jump list.

True, this project only took me a week to complete (to this level), but there were a lot of unknowns and problems with the managed Windows7 integration wrapper. Well, I guess I should write a blog post on those later

Download it here, give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

Lyre-setup.zip