Elephant

Elephant is a simple 'favorites' plugin for QCD, with a twist. Like any elephant, it remembers stuff... but this Elephant remembers more than you think. Elephant's menu sits quietly inside QCD's menus, keeping your favorite streams, playlists and programs (CD burner, encoder...) within reach. It also includes support for restoring a playlist after accidental deletion or a crash.

Elephant was created by Virtual Prince. Current version is 1.06 (also known as e6, because there's no good abbreviation for the word elephant), released on December 7th, 2002. Requires QCD b36.

• Run external programs and launch media sources from QCD's menu.
• Keep playlists for current playlist, previous playlist and selected tracks, for use with external programs or within Elephant.
• Create submenus and menu separators.
• Define startup hooks.
• Quickly add tracks and playlists via right-clicking QCD's playlist or Elephant's menu.
• Configure Elephant in regular (list) view or in tree view.

External Programs

Any file or URL can be called from a menu item. Select an option from External Programs and enter the command in Elephant's configuration window. Note: If the path includes spaces, enclose it (only the path, not the command-line parameters) in double-quotes.

Media Sources

Any file type (media file, playlist or URL) supported by QCD can be loaded directly into the player by clicking a menu item. Select an option from Media Sources and enter the desired info in Elephant's configuration window.

Current, Previous and Selected Playlists

Elephant always saves the current playlist (curr.m3u) and the previous playlist (prev.m3u). It also generates a playlist of the selected tracks (sel.m3u) when required for commands executed in Elephant. These files are saved in the QCD folder, and can be used by Elephant's menu for some nifty functions like 'restore previous playlist' (even after a QCD crash!) or 'burn selected tracks'.

Keywords

Special keywords allow access to Elephant's internal functions via its menu. Keywords should be placed in the command edit box, and any display name can be used. The keywords are: configure to open the configuration window, break to set a menu break (separator), addsel to add selected tracks to Elephant, addcurr to add current track to Elephant, and addpl to add selected tracks to Elephant as a playlist.

Submenus

Submenus are defined by the substart (submenu start) and subend (submenu end) keywords. A startup folder can be defined (by giving the display name 'startup') which is hidden from view, but items within (excluding submenus thereof) will be launched on QCD/Elephant startup (also known as 'startup hooks'); this action is similar to the 'startup' menu in Windows 'programs' menu.

Download Elephant

Now that you know all about it, you might want to download it. Any questions should be directed at elephant@vprince.com. Enjoy!