No need to be paranoid.
I'll take that as a "no", we cannot get media center to not go online short of forbidding it with our firewalls. Too bad.]
How about the changing file size thing? Couldn't you keep MC from altering files, and just keep the various info in its own database before?
For finding albums, try right clicking on a track and choosing Locate.
Thanks Jim, that works. It's not as graphically elegant as I would like, but it does get the job done.
I've added a back button to the tool bar to get back to my "normal" view when I'm done choosing tracks. It'd be handier if "Back" could be in the right click menu too.
It is nice that the 2-Step Locate command will be at the top of the right-click menu after I use it, as long as I don't do anything else in between.
How about some of my other questions:
Can the columns in the Upper Pane be made to auto sort or pare down based on the selections in the Lower Pane? Can they even be resized for width the way the ones in the Lower Pane can be?
I guess I'm using the interface backwards. It seems it's intended to be used by choosing various selections in the Upper Pane and having them pared down and shown, by those choices, in the Lower Pane. That's fine, but I guess I'd then want just the album column above, set to thumbnail view. This doesn't appear to be possibile.
How about getting the playing now list up all the time? Just a list. I don't need thumbnails or all the file properties, just a visable cue on the side or bottom of the screen showing what's coming up.
Another thing I was wondering about: Can the list in the Lower Pane be collapseable. By that I mean like ... forgive me for saying this here ... MusicMatch?
I find it real handy, if I do have to browse using a list, to be able to just expand the artist I'm looking at for the moment. If I have multiple tracks by an artist, I don't want to have to scroll past all of them just to get to something else below.
Please don't say "Well, go use MusicMatch then." I have/do. But I'm looking for something better. Like I said at the start of this thread, I wish to browse by the artwork ... like a jukebox. I'd gladly pay a couple hundred dollars for the TuchTune software, but they won't sell it. (I'd still have a place for MC though)
Please, anyone, jump in and teach me something, or comment about what I'm talking about here. There were 60 views of this thread, but only the one response before I wrote this.
Can plug-ins do what I'm asking for (I warned that I don't know how to write code more complicated than HTML)