Working with the Internal Player and the Now Playing pane

Introduction

The Internal Player is located at the bottom of Helium Music Managers user interface.
It contains the most common commands needed to replay music such as: (Listed from left to right)

• Previous track which plays the previous track in the Active Playlist. Shift+Click this button to rewind five seconds in the track currently playing.
• Play which plays the selected track in the Active Playlist. When you play a track, this button will change into a Pause button.
• Stop which just stops the current track.
• Next Track which plays the next track in the Active Playlist. Shift+Click this button to fast forward five seconds.

• This button will let you activate/inactivate Auto-Enqueue.

• This button will let you start/stop the selected Visualization Plugin.

• This button will let you activate/inactivate crossfading.

• This button will let you activate/inactivate repeating of the Active Playlist.

• This button will let you mute/unmute the music.

• A position slider which enables you to jump back and forward within the song.
• A volume slider which enables you to control the output volume.
• A rating control which enables you to apply a rating to the song that is currently being played.
• A image which will show the assigned album cover for the current track (if any).
• A track timer which shows the elapsed/remaining time. You can click this control to toggle the output mode to remaining/elapsed time.
• Two information lines containing tag information about the track that is currently being played and whether the track will be sent to Last.fm/Audioscrobbler (see Share your listening experience for details of Last.fm/Audioscrobbler support) .

Other player functions

The Internal Player offers you to invoke several functions from the context menu, everything from changing color to adding entries to playlists and much more. For a detailed list of the available context menu functions read more in the help.

Player mode

You can use Helium Music Manager as a stand-alone player in a small sized format by right clicking the player and select Player Mode from the context menu.
 
When Helium Music Manager is running in player mode, it will look like the image below:


 
You can access all commands from the Internal Player as normal, but the window doesn't take up as much space on the desktop.
To restore Helium Music Manager to standard mode again, simply right click the Internal Player again and select Standard Mode from the context menu.
 

Introducing the Now Playing Tab

Available from the Right Sidebar is the Now Playing tab.

The Now Playing tab is a control presenting various statistical information about the track that is currently being played.

 

The Now Playing tab will show information such as title, artist, album and release year.  It will also (when possible) show information about how many times the track has been played before, when it was first played and when it was last played.

Tasks

The tasks section allows you to quickly invoke common tools for the file currently being played, such as the Tag Editor, the Tag Editor (Spreadsheet Mode) among others.

Suggested Tracks

The Now Playing tab will also show (when possible) suggested tracks. Suggested tracks contains a list of ten suggested tracks, returned from combinations of similar artist relations, ratings, played-count and genre.
You can play any of the resulting tracks (if they are available) by single clicking that track.
When the selected track is being played, the Now Playing tab will be updated with this information and so on.

This allows you to use a new kind of playing/browsing mode which can help you to find and play music you forgot that you had in your collection.

Favourites from artist

The favourites section will list the favourite tracks from the artist that is currently being played.
Single click one of the files to play it (if the file is available).

Albums from artist

This section will list the ten most recent albums from the artist that is currently being played.
If the album you are currently playing is listed in this list, its track list will be shown with clickable links for each track.

 

You can right click the Now Playing pane to access a context menu which allows you to quickly Play and/or Enqueue the shown Suggested and Favourite Tracks.