I like adding songs to eJ as I acquire them--which means in groups anywhere from one to a dozen.

I usually drag and drop them into an open eJ playlist to add the song to the eJ database. I'm aware that I COULD add a whole directory at a time via the option to do this, but I tend to organize my music directories around 700 Mb collections, for backup purposes--therefore I'm adding in a trickle as the most current disk is "filled".

The drag and drop method has a big disadvantage. You can't multi-select files in windows and drop them all at once into the playlist. You HAVE to drag and drop them one at a time.

If an actual multi-drag and drop operation can't be supported, how about putting eJ queueing commands into the registry as a windows shell commands (the commands which show up when you right-click on a file)? They shouldn't, of course, take over the default action for MP3 files, but this could very well be made into a supplementary shell command.

Any word on this? I can't believe I'm the only one who's eager for something like this.

My recent experience with deleting and re-scanning certain existing directories to capture some massive changes to their contents went REALLY badly and I'm convinced more than ever that some level of Explorer shell integration would be a boon. I was trying to ensure that songs which had been moved between one directory and another didn't show up in the DB as if they were in both places, and didn't have the patience to go into the DB deleting the old locations one at a time. So I deleted all directories involved from the DB (finding one song in each directory and choosing the directory deletion option), moved the files I had to move, and then reimported all of these directory. The bad news? ONLY the songs which were in new locations showed up in eJ at all. The songs which deleted but were in the same location when I reimported DID NOT show up in the DB. So I had to go into Windows Explorer and ponderously drag them, one at a time, into the queue list (which took about an hour, since this was a lot of directories).

Putting aside my weird DB problems, this would have been a heck of a lot easier with proper shell integration. If I'd been able to mass select songs in Explorer, right click and pick "add to eJ queue" it would have been a snap. Or even better, as previously suggested, a second possible Explorer shell option, "add to eJ database" (which wouldn't put the song in the active queue) would have been even better.

I know this is all DDE type stuff, so it's a bit out of line with normal VB type programming, but it's in there somewhere, and I think would be quite useful for dealing with ANY group of music files sitting on a hard drive.

In the pre-ejukebox era I used a combination of winamp and directory opus (a filemanager), when playing my music. I remember that I came over a dde plugin for winamp that did a few interesting things. It let's winamp communicate with external program like the filemanager. So I simply created some buttons for diropus and made it execute different commands like play, enqueue, forward, next and such for selected files or dirs. In other words: a frontend to winamp external to the program itself.

An example:

ddeexec [openfile]
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"FrogrammerLydWinampwinamp.exe" /dde


I don't know how well it works with ejukebox however. And I don't know if you can use it in a smart way inside explorer for your purpose.

Anyways the plugin is found at: http://www.gpsoft.com.au/files/gen_dde.zip and directory opus at : http://www.dopus.com

As a general comment, I can wholeheartedly reccommend using Dopus as well. As an windows explorer replacement, it is close to being a necessity, and as a general file manager, it is the best tool i have ever come across!

This is a key point. I don't think you need any special external tool to add Windows shell enhancements. So you want to batch-enque items from Win explorer into the eJ playlist? Well, the program has to be able to accept it somehow. Simply batch enqueing into Winamp doesn't work, because eJ circumvents the Winamp queue. And adding files directly to the database without enquing them? I can't even begin to imagine how you'd do that without changes to eJukebox to accept it.

Quote:

Originally posted by Fishy In the pre-ejukebox era I used a combination of winamp and directory opus (a filemanager), when playing my music. I remember that I came over a dde plugin for winamp that did a few interesting things. It let's winamp communicate with external program like the filemanager. So I simply created some buttons for diropus and made it execute different commands like play, enqueue, forward, next and such for selected files or dirs. In other words: a frontend to winamp external to the program itself. An example: ddeexec [openfile] ddeapp WINAMP ddetopic System "FrogrammerLydWinampwinamp.exe" /dde I don't know how well it works with ejukebox however. And I don't know if you can use it in a smart way inside explorer for your purpose. Anyways the plugin is found at: http://www.gpsoft.com.au/files/gen_dde.zip and directory opus at : http://www.dopus.com