Windows Media Player 12: How to permanently display the list pane

and btw - quit associating playlists with the list pane. Playlists are great for saving a sequence of videos/songs - but the folks complaining on here were using the list pane to arrange items AS THEY ARE PLAYING, which means you have to be able to see the list pane at all times. 

The whole concept behind Windows (as if I have to remind you) was for user friendly layouts that were "customizable" by the user - making window elements vanish for no particular reason is bad programming

I think I figured out how to solve this problem. We all know that we can re-show the list pane after it auto hides by right-clicking the now playing screen and choosing "Show List". What we need to know is how to keep it from EVER auto-hiding again. I couldn't get this to happen until I right-clicked the black area where the song title is displayed (just under the top window border) instead of the area where the video or album art is displayed. Right clicking in the title area like this brought up the same shortcut menu as before, but displayed the list pane permanently instead of temporarily when I told it to.

The only problem I had after that was that WMP suddenly widened the widow so that it could show the album art, instead of making room for it by hiding the playlist. Fortunately though this only happened once. I re-sized the window back to just the list pane, and it stayed that way.

I hope this works for everybody, because I agree: this problem was EXTREMELY irritating until I figured this out. I find this to be a common theme in MS products. A feature is so obviously needed, and finding out how to do it is unbelievably counter-intuitive, until I finally DO figure it out. Once I do, it makes sense, and I can see how the developers would have thought it made sense when they made it, but the truth is that it is only obvious and user friendly if the user is thinking in EXACTLY the same way that they were. *chuckles ruefully*

***EDIT***

Problem not completely solved. It started auto hiding again when I used the library and went back to now playing, and then my trick from before made no difference. One more thing I had to do:

Go to visualizations and set to "No Visualization" so that the player didn't think it had anything it needed to hide the list pane for. I think that did it, but only time will tell. Obviously this will only work for audio files, not videos, since videos always have something to display anyway.

Gawd--maybe it's finally time to make Real Player my default. It plays more file formats anyway.

LucasT said: GO OPTIONS > PLAYER > UNCHECK AUTOHIDE

Problem: Does not exist.

You can go OPTIONS and then open the PLAYER tab, but there is no AUTOHIDE box or option ANYWHERE in that tab or any other.

 

 

 

All of the normal options as mentioned above regarding Organize → Layout → etc. but to get this to work I also did the following:

→ play video in your playlist or start playing playlist to populate in sidebar

→ right-click anywhere on playing video

→ Video

→ make sure both are checked:

    √ Fit Player to Video on Resize

    √ Fit Player to Video (this has to be checked for this to work)

→ right-click and Show List

→ test by clicking through each selection.

If list closes, just close WMP 12 and re-open and it should work. Now if I could only get rid of that rating column.

 

 

This works perfectly, if counter-intuitively. Just reposting it because people seem to be missing this, which is a practical solution.