If Winamp suddenly stopped opening, playing, enqueuing shortcuts to audio folders
Winamp normally adds at least one option to the Windows Explorer context menu, so that when you right-click on audio files or folders you can have them “Play in Winamp“. This command works equally for the audio files themselves and for shortcuts to audio files, as well as for folders and for shortcuts to folders that contain audio files.
You may face a serious problem, when this context option exists, but it won’t work with shortcuts to folders. It works just fine when you right click on a folder that contains audio files, but not when you right click on a shortcut to that folder.
Re-installing Winamp won’t be of any help. Most probably some other program you installed recently, like Mp3Tag, has changed the default Windows folder settings. You can correct this, by downloading a registry file. For security reasons the file is zipped. Extract its contents to a folder of your choice and run the file named “win7-folder-default-config.reg” to reset folder settings to the default state. After that Winamp (or other players) should work fine.
Please note that after reverting to the default settings, some of your programs may lose their place in the folders’ context (right click) menu, including Winamp itself. You can have them again appear in the context menu, by going to their preferences and selecting again the relevant options, or even by re-installing them. Of course, you must not do this for programs that damage the Winamp entries.
You can also avoid reverting to the default folder configuration and use other, worse in my opinion, methods, such as putting Winamp itself to the “Send To” context menu of Windows Explorer, or creating yourself a Play and an Enqueue command for shortcuts (read the next pages for these).
