chinny22 wrote on 2020-02-04, 09:39:
... Winamp 2.95 is definitely the version of you want . It was the most widely used at the time so contemporary (well 2.x was) has loads of plugings already mentioned and you can have it start to play a file if not open and end queue if already open. Even back in the day when 3 came out everyone went nope and went back to 2 ...
Okay, I went back and installed Winamp 2.95 and also the plug-in mentioned earlier (the ability to play MP3's through the EMU8000 chip is freakin' cool) but I still cannot get the interface to behave as I want. I see the "enqueue by default" option in Winamp's preferences, and selecting this option DOES add songs launched from file explorer to the end of the playlist but launching a song without the player open DOES NOT cause the player to start with a fresh new playlist and more importantly, the player DOES NOT immediately start playing the song I just launched UNLESS I had manually cleared the playlist before the last time I closed Winamp. If there's any pre-existing playlist already there within Winamp when it opens, it instead starts playing the last song that it had played the last time it had been open. It will eventually get to the song I clicked, but it doesn't jump to it immediately.
Perhaps there's a launch switch I could pass to Winamp that would change this behavior? Or maybe an earlier version does what I want? So far I've tried 3.0, 2.95, 2.92, 2.91, and 2.90.
This is actually becoming rather confusing! This page from 2001: https://web.archive.org/web/20010330183123/ht … v/sdk/api.jhtml claims that Winamp does exactly what I want when the /ADD switch is used:
C:\path\to\winamp\winamp.exe /ADD C:\mp3\whatever.mp3
(Adds C:\mp3\whatever.mp3 to the playlist of a running Winamp, if Winamp is running, otherwise it opens Winamp and plays it outright)
but in my case it picks up playing at the beginning of whatever song was last played instead of "playing it outright."
UPDATE: The best workaround I've found so far is to start with an empty Winamp playlist (using version 2.95 still) and to write-protect both winamp.m3u and winamp.ini (Winamp's default playlist file and its config file.) This forces it to start with a blank playlist whenever it's loaded from disk, but while it's open I can enqueue files to it by launching them from the shell. A drawback is that I had to uninstall the AweAmp plugin because write-protecting winamp.ini while that plugin was still installed would cause Winamp to crash upon launch... but Winamp still works with the DirectSound plugin, which still allows for audio mixing with games, which was the original goal of this journey.