I often just set my Windows Media Player to play shuffle [random] from my whole
ID: 660399 • Letter: I
Question
I often just set my Windows Media Player to play shuffle [random] from my whole collection (which is actually a mix of my collection, my parents and my sister's so it has a very wide range). I'm often busy, doing dishes or something and I don't want to have to wash my hands and go to the computer to find out what that song is if I'm really enjoying a song.
So I want to have the player announce the song Title/Contributing Artist.
I'm fine with it being a plugin or standalone player. If it is standalone player/plugin to something other than Windows Media Player; my requirements are pretty much nothing - be able to read (recursively) through a folder for music files and play shuffle/random. I'm fine to have to do library management elsewhere.
Explanation / Answer
Metal Player has an option to verbally announce next song, or the song that has just finished. Default it's disabled, but you can enable this option from Settings > Intelligent Playback.
It has options to add files/folders and play them as you want: random, recursively or based on your musical preferences (it has some intelligent playback algorithms that learns your preferences with each song that you play).
Note: Metal Player uses Microsoft Speech. The best experience is obtained on Windows 8, which Microsoft has greatly improved speech synthesis. In older versions of Windows the voice is not as realistic.