
This is an excerpt from the main AMPlay documentation (v2.03).

* 4.5 Menus:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

* 4.5.1 Menu Formats:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This screen allows you to define format strings for all the menus in
AMPlay that contain artist, album or track names. As before refer to
section 2.12 for details on macros, or use the quick reference button.

Interactive help works as on the Display window, and will expand the
macro on the fly. Again, AMPlay needs to be running for this to work.


* 4.5.2 Other menu options:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Menu block size:

This is a workaround for the problem that although menus are a very
convenient mechanism for choosing an item from a list of items, they
can become unwieldy if the list of items is very long. It's one thing
to offer a menu of 10 tracks, but 10,000 tracks is an entirely
different kettle of fish. Even if displaying 10,000 items on a single
menu were possible, it wouldn't be very usable.

This option allows you to specify how many entries should be displayed
at once. If the menu contains more than x entries, only the first x
will be shown, with an extra entry at the end to move to the next block
of entries. As you move forward in the menu, an extra item at the top
appears to allow you to move back.

This has some advantages - expanding a macro is not particularly time
consuming, but it gets slow if there are a large number to expand. The
All Tracks goto menu for instance may involve many thousands of tracks.
By constraining it to just x entries, much less macro expansion has to
be done, and the menu can be produced much more quickly.

For menus where there is a currently selected item, the menu will
open with the currently selected item in the middle of the initial
block.

AMPlay will try to avoid blocks with just one item in them. For
example, the menu of tracks by the current artist might contain 32
items. If the block size is 30, and we're currently playing track 16,
the menu could display tracks 2-31, with links to the previous and next
blocks. However, each of those blocks would contain only one track, so
rather than take up menu space with the links to the previous and next
blocks, it includes the items in question. i.e. it makes the menu block
longer, if needed, to accommodate single extra items at the start and/or
end.

Block menus apply to all menus that are automatically generated
based on information in the database, where the number of items in the
menu is not fixed. This includes all the goto menus, the history menus,
the search results menu, and the album and artist menus in the database
editor.


Reverse history menu:

This causes the History menus to be generated the other way up.
With this enabled, the most recently played items will be at the top
of the menu. "Clear History" remains the topmost item in either case.


Filtered items appear greyed on goto menus:

This causes the Goto menus to show any items that do not pass the
current effective filter as greyed-out entries. If disabled, such items
are not shown at all.


Dividers between artists out of sort order:

Tricky one to describe, this. It is only likely to be useful if you
are using the raw sort option described later. Suppose you had files
in the database such as:

  ADFS::Disc.$.MP3.Comedy.MontyPython.LifeOfBrian.BrightSide/mp3
  ADFS::Disc.$.MP3.Music.DevinTownsend.Terria.DeepPeace/mp3

When sorted using the raw sort option, they would end up as above,
due to Comedy coming before Music.

When an artist menu is generated, it would contain;

  MontyPython
  DevinTownsend

Here, because of a difference in the path to the artist in the raw
database entry, we have one artist appearing after another but
alphabetically (by artist name alone) it should be before it.

This option inserts a menu divider into the menu whenever it spots
a case like this.

If you are using the sort by name option instead of raw sort, then
the sort is done using the artist, album and track names only, and
anything earlier in the path is ignored. In this case the artist menu
will always be in alphabetical order.

________________________________________________________________________
Copyright  2008 Mike Sandells, mike@mikejs.com
Last Modified: 30.05.2008