Alex, we are very close in the way we use MC. I also tag everything. I've been using the Stacking function to stack and add at the same time all of the files to the database. Stacking works perfectly from the Drives & Devices view except that collapsing a stack changes the top of stack icon and doesn't actually collapse the stack. More than a few releases ago, the stacking functionality was removed from the right click menu when viewing in Drives & Devices. My work around here has been to go to a Library View and perform the stacking functions I want. These will now be available to me in Drives and Devices as I have my "Right Click recent commands count" set to 8. This is just another example where they give us functionality and they alter it or take it away. Once I have them stacked, tagging Artist, Album, Genre, Year and Info (my text data field for identifying version, I have 7 versions of Dark Side Of The Moon) is extremely simple. I do a rename and hit enter in each field of the top of stack file and in 10 key strokes I've tagged all of the files.
So when your using an All Media view and select the folder you want to play, the data files get added to Playing Now I would assume.
Just a thought, developers are currently making modifications to the File Types area. Wouldn't it make sense to use this list to decide which file types, including data types, that are capable to be played (added to Playing Now)? You can set these various file types to No for their association to MC. If a file type is set to No, it would never be added to Playing Now. By the way, this is one of the many ways I've tried to work around the situation but MC still adds the files regardless of how I set the association switch.
Thanks for your post and a thanks in advance for any influence you might have to find a better solution for playing data files.
leezer3, I certainly have a better understanding of why you supported the addition of the data files to Playing Now. Your post also enlightened me to the fact that you could use this for scripting purposes. I would really be interested in the script your using to tag files in Playing Now as I can see this would be very beneficial for tagging. As I stated earlier, I'm tagging all files for an album with Artist, Album, Genre, Year and a self defined field named Info where I have version information, Remaster, Japanese Edition, secondary release date and the such.
Does the script take specific tag information in the audio files and apply them to all files being played?
Thanks for you post and again, thanks for your help