I think it has been great to see how quickly you've picked up MC and started learning about its many features, including the more advanced ones. Bravo!
Thank you MrC for the compliment (and the help in other posts). Getting this figured out within the trial period was only possible with the constructive help from the forum. My appreciation goes out to all that helped.
For anyone that may be interested, I am posting my final solution below, as promised earlier. My exact requirements were not possible within MC (using Options), but through the use of MCC Commands and scripting, I was able to accomplish all I needed.
To summarize, my requirements were to establish a single button that would 1) automatically start playing seemingly random songs, without repeats, 2) automatically launch the Visualizer, as well as 3) have a means to easily reduce the Visualizer (double click or ESC) so that users unfamiliar with MC can intuitively add their choice of songs (also using double click or right click) if so desired. "Intuitive" being an operative word since I was not interested in a complicated solution that requires training people that come over (or that are untrainable
)
I ended up commenting out the Play Dr entry below in lieu of using a Smartlist = Not Recently Played because Play Dr has a quirk/bug where it stops automatically adding songs once a user adds a song (described in more detail above). I would probably go back to trying Play Dr if this gets changed since overall it seems very cool.
Here is my final script that gets put into a file called buttonname.vsf. A Windows shortcut to this file can be created on the Desktop if a non-vb icon is desired.
<package>
<job id="vbs">
<script language="VBScript">
'Create Shell object - credit and thanks to glynor for the lead on this
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
'Start MC
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe"
'Pause for a bit
WScript.Sleep 1500
'Set to Zone 0 (0 is Zone 1= PC Speakers and 1 is Zone 2 = S/PDIF Output)
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 10011,0"
'Pause for a bit
WScript.Sleep 1000
'Start Autoplaylist (aka Play Dr)
'WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 10047"
' Opens the Smartlist "Not Recently Played" for Editing so a refresh can be done
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC Command 21026, 715178384"
' Sends a Keyboard Enter to refresh the Smartlist
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC Command 27000, 13"
'Pause for a bit
WScript.Sleep 1000
' Loads the Smartlist "Not Recently Played" into the Playlist and starts playing it.
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC Command 30007, 715178384"
'or 'WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /PlayReplace TREEPATH=Playlists\Smartlists\Not Recently Played"
'Pause for a bit
WScript.Sleep 1500
'Remove Dups from Playing Now
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 10040"
'Suffle Remaining
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 10041"
'Attach Display
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 10037,0"
'Move View to Audio so Usrs can select other songs
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 22003,2"
'Set Mode to = Display (which makes the Visualizer go full screen)
WshShell.Run "MC17.exe /MCC 22000,2"
</script>
</job>
</package>
[Edited to add commands that refresh the Smartlist]
nPlaylistID "715178384" was identified using the process defined here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=10894.0