DDE control of Winamp from Dopus

Help & Support
1

I found a very promising FAQ post explaining how to make toolbar buttons and hotkeys to control Winamp from Dopus using a plugin called "gen_dde".

I played around with this for a while and here are my results. First, the successes:

With code (1), Winamp starts playing, but it doesn't play the file selected in Dopus; it simply plays the file that was already enqueued in Winamp. (This makes sense though.)

(1)
ddeexec play
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

With code (2), Winamp plays the file selected in Winamp, but it doesn't work for folders.

(2)
ddeexec play({filepath})
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

Now the failures. None of the following produced the desired result. I took the commands from the help text included with the gen_dde file.

(3)
ddeexec enqueue({filepath})
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

(4)
ddeexec next
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

(5)
ddeexec prev
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

(6)
ddeexec stop
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

(7)
ddeexec pause
ddeapp WINAMP
ddetopic System
"C:\Program Files\WinAMP\WinAMP.exe" /dde

Though I was certainly tickled to figure out something and make it work, neither (1) nor (2) are actually useful in practice. Just hitting Enter is a much easier way to get a file to play in Winamp since it's my default player. What I was really hoping for is a way to play folders. I usually do this through the context menu, where the "Play in Winamp" option works the same for files and folders. (Nevermind that I can't figure out how to hotkey context menus in Dopus! Aargh! I'll make a separate post for that.)

Any ideas? This would be a really awesome customization of Dopus!

I looked through all 143 googits for "gen_dde" but couldn't find any educational materials about this program. (I'm a total newbie to this fancy software stuff, but I'm trying to learn...)

By the way, the nunzioweb.com/sawgstuff/ site linked to in the FAQ post actually doesn't contain any "further details". It only has a link to the download.

Thanks,
Mike

2

After reading through the documentation, I didn't see there was a way to give a folder to allow WinAMP to build a playlist from. The only options I saw was to play file given or enque file given. Perhaps with the enque option there may be a way to handle this.

3

It's a while since I've looked at Winamp so maybe the API has more functions now, but back when I did look at it there was no way to pass a folder to it for playing; you'd have to pass each file instead.

Not sure if it's any more use than the DDE method but I wrote a Winamp plugin which adds a COM interface to Winamp to allow you to control it via VBScript (and VB, C++ etc.). If you know VBScript you could write some small scripts that Opus calls. See the bottom of this page for an example script. It's pretty simple to use. But it just exposes the Winamp API (that was available at the time) so still can't take a folder name directly (VBScript could be used to build the list of files, though.)

pretentiousname.com/gen_scripting/index.html

4

[quote="nudel"]It's a while since I've looked at Winamp so maybe the API has more functions now, but back when I did look at it there was no way to pass a folder to it for playing; you'd have to pass each file instead.
[/quote]

With Winamp installed (I'm using v5.31), the context menu for folders gives a "Play" option. It works great. It gets the sole "P" assignment in my folder context menus, so I can just type Context + P to play any folder! It's elegant as heck. I love Winamp for so many reasons!

Wouldn't there be a way for Dopus to select all the files contained in a folder and pass that to Winamp?

In any case, I'll forget all this confusing DDE stuff for now and stick with Enter and Context + P!

Mike

5

It's been awhile since I've used Winamp (ITunes won me over a year or two back) but it seems like I could select whatever songs I wanted in Opus, and then drag and drop them right into Winamp. It might be worth a try anyway.

As to the selecting of all files in a folder, you can easily configure an Opus hot key to do that. I use the / key to do so, simply out of habit as that's what the old now long gone Norton file manager used.

6

If you edit your All Folders filetype in Opus you might find its context menu tells you the command that Winamp uses to send a folder name to be played. (It depends how the context menu item is added, though.)