Music track not showing up in Google Talk status?

For those who were busy fighting the aliens while Google Talk added the cool feature to display your currently playing music track in the Google status, please be aware that you can simply do so just by changing the status to “Show current music track”.

Now, it so happened that I eagerly tried the feature when it was launched, but Gtalk did not show the status with Windows Media Player 10, 11 or Winamp on my laptop. I thought maybe Google was sending the update slowly globally, so waited for a week or two, but nothing.

On further research I discovered that Google Talk installs a plug-in in Windows Media Player which sends the current music track to Gtalk. Now if, for any reason, WMP detects some problem with a plug-in, it disables it. This was the problem in my case. So here is what I did to enable my Google Talk plug-in:

1. Ensure that you have the latest Google Talk installed
2. In Windows Media Player, press Alt+T to access the tools menu
3. Press ‘Options’
4. Click on the ‘Plug-ins’ tab
5. On the left hand ‘Category’ pane, click on the ‘Background’ item
6. On the right hand ‘Background’ pane, click on the Google Talk plugin to check and enable it
7. Save changes and change the status in Google Talk to “Show current music track”

This worked for me, hope it helps you too!

Oh and by the way, Google’s fascination with collecting information in order to show us meaningful results found its way in GTalk too. Google has a service called Google Trends. If you wish, then Google can log what you listen too, and hence show meaningful trends such as the current most popular song etc. I have opted in :)

Happy chitter chatting!