Hi,
Having asked about more or less safe party modes I found a solution that sounds ok to me.
There's a free scripting software called Autohotkey (
http://www.autohotkey.de.vu/) that is flexible enough to allow you to lock certain keyboard and mouse actions. With this, I can make MM pretty party safe. I did some tests and within a couple of hours work it will be possible to get MM safe enough to use on a party.
Examples:
With autohotkey I can lock down keyboard access completely. I can also leave the keyboard on, but only allow mouse movements within the main window. It's even possible to lock down the playlist window so you can't double click to accidentally start a song. There's a password protected hotkey to allow me full access and I can lock the keyboard/mouse again with another keypress. Fighting WindowsXP experts - the kind of people that would press CTRL-Alt-Delete to mess with the system - might be a problem. But you can make sure that drunks do neither stop the music or damage your collection when MM runs in a public place.
Using Autohotkey is a power user approach, but it has the great advantadge that everybody can tailor the lock to his own needs.
So there's only one problem *huge* left.
No easy way to plan the next hour of the party.
No cuelist. But that's an easy fix.
I need just an option to remove the current song
from the playlist and to have the current playlist
alway play track number one as the next track.
(Currently it remembers the position so manually starting
a track at a position in the middle would confuse it.)
This way the playlist can be used as a cuelist to
cue the next 10-20 songs for the party.
The easiest way to do this would be an option that removes a song from the current playlist the moment it is loaded into the player. The playlist has no problem when I manually remove the title that is just playing so removing this automatically (if selected) shouldn't cause much trouble either.
If you make that possible in one of the next release candidates I will publish my Autohotkey scripts here when they are useful enough to be used in the forum for everyone to discuss.