Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

SimplifyMedia is an extremely useful program, which allows super easy song and playlist sharing via streaming between multiple computers. It also works as a Winamp plugin, so the shared songs simply show up inside Winamp's own media library – each computer sharing music appears under the special "Shared" tab. And the beauty is – there is no need to muck around with network settings, open ports, or even touch your router.

Here's a screenshot of how it's supposed to work:

The Problem

Since I recently installed Windows 7 64bit on my laptop, I wanted to set up SimplifyMedia on it and listen to some tracks in my favorite music player Winamp. However, after I downloaded and installed it and restarted Winamp, the Shared tab did not show up. The SimplifyMedia installer did tell me that a 64 bit version of Windows isn't explicitly supported but mentioned it should still work fine.

The Solution

After reinstalling, analyzing, and comparing with my other computers, I found that the SimplifyMedia installer didn't copy the needed Winamp plugin files, namely ml_simplify.dll and ml_simplifyexp.dll. After I copied them over into the Winamp/Plugins directory and restarted Winamp, the Shared tab showed up like a charm.