How To Run Multiple Instances Of Windows Media Player

The native audio and video player in Windows, Windows Media Player, is one of the popular media players available for Windows. Even though the player lacks some advanced features available in other popular media players such as VLC, Winamp, and GOM, it’s good enough for users who play music files once in a while and don’t mind installing a codec pack.

Most of us have installed more than one third-party media players and rarely use Windows Media Player, many users still use Windows Media Player to play audio files.

If you have used Windows Media Player for a while, you probably know that one can’t run multiple instances of Windows Media Player. That is, when WMP is playing a file, you can’t launch another instance of WMP to play another music file simultaneously. When you try to play or another file using WMP, WMP automatically starts playing the new file in the previously opened WMP window.

Both VLC and GOM players support this feature out of the box. But WMP doesn’t support this feature for some reason.

This feature can be enabled by editing the Windows Media Player Exe file but requires you to open the file with a resource editor. Users who would like to enable this feature without manually editing the system file can just download and run a simple software named Windows Media Player 12 Patch to enable the feature in Windows 7. The patch creates a backup of the original file so that you can revert to the default, in case something goes wrong.

How to use it:

Step 1: Visit this page and download the Multiple WMP zip file. Extract it to get the MultipleWMP.exe file.

Step 2: Close Windows Media Player, if running.

Step 3: Right-click on the Multiple WMP executable file and select Run as administrator. Click Yes for UAC prompt. Click on the Patch button to patch the file. Once Windows Media Player 12 finishes its job, you will see the “Done” message.

We tested it on Windows 7 (x64) and can confirm that it works without any issues.