Looking for a way to dazzle your relatives with a slideshow of photos from your last vacation set to the music of Jimmy Buffet? Maybe you just want quicker access to a few of your best playlists and a visualization loaded up. Either way the creators of PowerPlaylist2 have got you covered. Allowing you to set up to five options to display right on the main start menu using a handy configuration app PowerPlaylist2 is a snap to use.

Getting started is easy, just download and install the new PowerPlaylist2 package for Windows 7 from the CodePlex site (select Downloads and choose from the box on the right). After installation a new menu strip will be added to your Media Center start menu labeled PowerPlaylist 2 with the default entries already setup.

To customize the setup of the strip, including the strip title and each of the actions launch PowerPlaylist Editor from your Start Programs menu inside Windows.

Inside you’ll find a tab for each menu entry with options to set the title, images, playlist and a slideshow or visualization to load along with it. The Image and Nofocus Image are the icons used in the menu strip and the Title is the text displayed below the images.

Under Audio you can set a wpl playlist, which is the default Windows Media Player format, or any other Media Center  compatible playlist such as m3u. Under Slideshow select a directory in which your images are stored and Media Center will load all images in that folder as a slideshow. Select a Visualization by entering the name of the visualization as defined in Media Center’s visualization options.

Setting both a visualization and slideshow is of course not feasible and you will only see the slideshow displayed.

Once finished, save your settings with “File -> Save” and launch Media Center. Choose one of the options you’ve setup from the configuration app and bask in your audio/visual prowess.

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