A typical shell extension is meant to help a user work with a category of files. Let's suppose you're mainly interested in audio files (MP3, WMA, Monkey's Audio, Ogg Vorbis and so on), but there is no system-provided way to know about the title of a song, artist or album it belongs to. If you manipulate audio files extensively, then this shell extension can be really helpful for you.

The first solution that comes to mind is to add a new property page for these files. Actually, this isn't a very elegant approach since the user have to right-click, select the Properties menu item, and choose the correct tab to read the information. A much better way of getting the same result is by using infotips.

An infotip is a short bit of text that a tooltip control displays when the mouse hovers over a file of a certain type. This text snippet is meant to provide details about the content of that particular file. InfoTag Magic Infotip Shell Extension InfoTag Magic tells you the title, artist, album, duration, year and other information stored in the ID3 (MP3), Windows Media Audio, Monkey's Audio or Ogg Vorbis tags.

Also it provides quick and simple preview for plain text files, such as TXT, INI, LOG, BAT, DIZ, BAK and QUE. So, if you need to have a quick look to the text file you do not have to open it in a text editor. Just point the file name with your mouse in Windows Explorer and InfoTag Magic will display you first five lines of that file in a tooltip next to the mouse pointer.

As a bonus feature InfoTag Magic displays various properties (target file name, location, working directory, arguments) for Windows shortcuts and version information (file and product version numbers, product name and description, internal name and copyright) for executable files, such as EXE, DLL and OCX.