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[ti_dust]

I bought a license for Media Center 17 a few weeks ago because it sounds better than my old favorite foobar2000.  The transition from foobar to MC went quite smoothly, but I had a few questions about certain functionality I had in foobar that I'd like to replicate in MC, if possible.

First of all, I create a playlist called "Playback" where I cue a huge list of albums to listen to.  As I listen to them, I delete them from the playlist.

1. 1st question - when I'm initially creating my Playback playlist, I see MC has the function "Send To" where I can send a selected file/album/etc to a given playlist.  I had this set up as a hot key in foobar where I would simply select the album and hit the hot key and it would get added automatically to the Playback playlist.  I was wondering if it was possible to create a hot key in MC that 'Sends To' a specific playlist (already defined/created in MC).  I was looking at the hot key stuff in wiki and perhaps it has something to do with program command 30008 (MCC_SENDTO_TOOL) but I am not sure.  If I had to, I could easily use foobar to create the playlist and then import it into MC, but I was hoping I could do it all within MC.

2. 2nd question - when I rip new albums, I place them in my desired location on the hard drive, then I click and drag them from windows explorer to the Playback playlist so I can listen to them right away.  In foobar, I had the option to sort incoming files from explorer, and to include or exclude certain filetypes when doing so.  I've found this procedure to be very messy in MC whereby not only will the files not be sorted, but it also includes all the extra files contained in each folder (log, jpg, etc.).  I have to manually fix everything when I do so... not so bad for a few albums, but a PITA when adding many albums.  Is there any way to accomplish this in MC?

3. 3rd question - I listen to music away from the PC and use a remote to control the music.  I use the Playing Now/Info sections of theater view so I can see what is playing.  While this works fine, my SLI rig spits out a bunch of heat since it thinks its a 3D app (which really it is) and the extra heat is not so good in summer.  With foobar, I had a plugin which wrote a text file containing info about the currently playing file.  I then had a Samurize screensaver config which read the file and displayed the info.  The "WritePlaying" plugin is the only one I found for MC, and it likes to crash since its so old, plus it very limited on the amount of info you can write.  I was hoping there was some way I could accomplish this in MC, hopefully allowing me to write any library field into the text file, and it would update every x seconds, or on track change, pause, play, stop, etc.  Think of it as the "nowplaying simple" foobar plugin, only for MC.  I also thought perhaps it was possible to do this via script, but I would have no idea how to go about it.

Thank you very much for the help! 

[rick.ca]

Welcome.

Sometimes, trying to replicate the behaviour of another program will make it more difficult to discover a better way...

1. Type 'Ctrl+O double' and set the double-click behaviour option to Add to Playing Now (to end). Use Playing Now to built your playlist by double-clicking objects to add. Each time you do so, the program will save the previous state of Playing Now under Playlists\Recent Playing Now's. That will give you the means to 'undo' should you change your mind about something added. When done, double-click something (e.g., the last item again) just to force the creation of a final Recent Playing Now playlist. You can now drag & drop that playlist to another location and rename it.

2. Configure Auto-Import to import what you want (e.g., only audio files from audio folders). It will normally import the files shortly after you've moved them to their 'desired location'—if that's included in the configured locations. The files imported will then appear in the Recently Imported playlist, which you can use to select and play them.

3. I'm not sure what you mean by 'away from the PC', but assume the monitor is still in view. You can display Playing Now in Standard View with a static (i.e., 2D) 'Track Info' visualization in a large split. If that's not visible enough, right-click and choose 'Display View' to show the same thing full-screen.

[ti_dust]

Thanks for the info rick.ca!

1. This works... I just change the behavior of double-click in options, add to playing now (end), then when done, select all and drag it to my 'Playback' playlist, so that way it retains the custom view I set up for it.

2. I could always drag from recently imported to my Playback playlist.  Still no way of sorting selected items within a playlist or view (that I know of) but I could probably tweak/custom sort the recently imported playlist before dragging.

3. By 'away from the pc' I mean lying in bed    and can still see the monitor.  Looks like Display view is exactly what I need - I can initiate Display View from my remote then start playing.  After a quick test, my video cards stay in 2D clock mode so it should take care of the heat problem.  I thought I came across some skins for Playing Now, and perhaps I could even create my own skin since I do have some skinning experience.