AdLib ZIP Menu Version 3.0 Released April 19, 1991 Written by Keith Ledbetter 4240 Ketcham Drive Chesterfield, VA 23832 (804) 674-0780 (6:00pm - 10:00pm Eastern Time) Tech Support BBS: Blue Ridge Express 804-790-1675 26 Phone Lines Sub-board KEITHL ("J KEITHL") Electronic mail on GEnie: ORION.MICRO CompuServe: 72240,1221 AdMenu and ADMplay are Copyright 1990-1991 by Keith Ledbetter. All rights reserved. Portions Copyright Borland, International. Written in Borland C++. AdMenu v3.0 Page 1 Revision History Version Changes made ------- -------------------- 3.0 - AdMenu now has its own "ROL player"! This new player is called ADMPLAY.EXE, and should be placed somewhere in your PATH directories. This module replaces the PLAYROL.EXE file that you needed with earlier releases. Since 99% of the tech support questions on Admenu were because of PLAYROL (eg: "not enough memory to allocate timbre"), I decided to write my own. This should alleviate all of the "out of memory" problems people have been having when they have very large bank files. 2.0 - "ZIP comments" are now used (instead of the file name) as a way to give more meaningful titles to your songs. If no comment is in the ZIP file for a given song, that file's name will appear as the title. The maximum length of each comment is 25 characters. - Loading of the ZIP file is now about 80% faster. - Maximum number of songs per ZIP file was reduced from 2048 to 1024, due to the overhead of allowing longer song names (25 characters instead of 8). - Added an "Edit" button so that you can easily add comments (longer song titles) to your ZIP file. PKZIP will be spawned to add each title. If you're doing lots of comment editing, it'll probably be a lot faster to do it yourself with PKZIP, as in: C:> pkzip -c songs.zip b*.rol which will allow you to add comments to all of your B*.ROL files in one shot. - Added a "Sort song names" function, mostly to be used after you've "E"dited a bunch of song names. 1.2 - Major cosmetic changes were made to the display. - Added a "find" function to search for partial text in the song names. - Pressing ALT + a letter (ie: ALT-B) takes you to the first song whose name begins with that letter (or, the next letter if no songs exist starting AdMenu v3.0 Page 2 Revision History with the specified letter). 1.1 Minor cosmetic changes. 1.0 Initial release. AdMenu v3.0 Page 3 Introduction Thank you for taking the time to try out AdMenu v3.0. I just recently purchased an Adlib Music card, and I couldn't believe how quickly I ate up disk space with various song files (".ROL" files). In just the first week after purchasing the Adlib card, I had 496 song files eating up over 4 MB of precious space on my hard drive. So, one day I got to thinking (yes, I know how dangerous that is!) ... "Hmmm...wouldn't it be great if there was some way for me to ZIP down all of these song files, yet still play them quickly and painlessly?". And (surprise, surprise), AdMenu was my answer to my own needs. AdMenu allows you to ZIP down all of your .ROL files into one ZIP file, yet still play them from AdMenu's powerful menu system. AdMenu will present you with a scrollable menu of each file within your song ZIP file, which you can easily play at the touch of a button. AdMenu also supports (but does not require) a Microsoft compatible mouse. AdMenu will support up to 2,048 files within a single ZIP file. If you have more files than this, simply create multiple ZIP files and tell AdMenu through the command line parameter which one you want to use. AdMenu doesn't do all of the work itself, so the following two programs are REQUIRED to use AdMenu: ADMPLAY.EXE and PKUNZIP.EXE. ADMPLAY was included in the archive for AdMenu; PKUNZIP is readily available on both GEnie and CompuServe. AdMenu v3.0 Page 4 How It Works AdMenu works hand-in-hand with two other programs which you must have somewhere in your PATH chain. When AdMenu boots up, it reads all of the ".ROL" filenames present in the ZIP file that you told it to use. It will then present you with a menu from which you can select song(s) to be played. When you select a song, AdMenu does the following steps: o It creates a temporary directory on drive C:\. (See below if you need to change it to another drive). o It calls PKUNZIP to extract the file selected into the temporary directory just created. o It calls ADMPLAY.EXE to play the song just extracted. o It deletes the extracted file and the temporary directory. You must make sure that both PKUNZIP.EXE and ADMPLAY.EXE are somewhere in your PATH. Just to make sure, AdMenu checks this for you when it's first invoked, and will refuse to run if these programs aren't found. Also, AdMenu DOES NOT load SOUND.COM for you; you must make sure that your sound driver is installed before running AdMenu. If you would prefer that AdMenu create the temporary files on a drive other than drive C:, you can set an environment variable named AD_DRIVE. For example, to tell AdMenu to use drive D: instead of drive C:, you would do the following: "set ad_drive=D" The easiest way to do this is to put the above command into your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, so it will always get set at bootup time. AdMenu v3.0 Page 5 Setting It Up and Running It OK, enough of that boring stuff. Let's get our ZIP file set up and try AdMenu out. In this example, we will assume that: (a) all of your .ROL files are in a subdirectory named C:\ADLIB\SONGS. (b) that your STANDARD.BNK file is in C:\ADLIB. First, you would change to your C:\ADLIB\SONGS subdirectory and enter in the following command: "pkzip -m Songs.Zip *.rol" This command will create a ZIP file named SONGS.ZIP, and will move each .ROL file into the ZIP file and then delete them. Go ahead and execute this command......there, that should have freed up TONS of disk space! Now, make sure that your SOUND.COM sound driver is installed, and then simply invoke AdMenu with the following command: "AdMenu c:\adlib\songs\songs.zip c:\adlib\standard.bnk" With this command line, you have told AdMenu that (a) your song ZIP file is named "c:\adlib\songs\songs.zip", and that you want to use the bank file named "c:\adlib\standard.bnk". If you have PKUNZIP and ADMPLAY in your PATH directories, then AdMenu will proceed to load in the filenames from your ZIP file and present you with a menu of each song available. AdMenu v3.0 Page 6 Working With the Menu You should now be looking at AdMenu's main menu. You will notice a scroll box in the middle of the screen with the different song names in it. You can scroll up and down these names with either of the following ways: o The up and down cursor keys o The PgUp and PgDn keys o Clicking on the scroll-bar arrows o Clicking on the PgUp or PgDn boxes The song name that is highlighted in red is the current song that you wish to act on. You can do the following: o Press ,

, click the left mouse button, or click on the Play box to play this one song. o Press , click the right button, or click on the Mark box to mark this song for playing. o Press or click on the Play All Marked box to play all songs that you have marked (this option will only be available if you have at least one song marked). If you are playing "All marked songs", you will be given roughly ten seconds at the end of each song to abort the playing. If you don't press a key within this time, the program will continue on playing the next song. AdMenu v3.0 Page 7 That's All, Folks! That's about it for AdMenu. I think the program is pretty easy to catch on to, so I'm not going to go on with page after page of documentation. While this program is copyrighted by me, it may be distributed freely by any individual or club as long as no more than $2 is charged for the service. If you have any comments about this program, or have specific things that you'd like to see added to it, please drop me a line at any of the places mentioned on the first page of this document. If you feel that you'd like to contribute some money for this program, it would be graciously accepted. You can mail it to the address given on the first page. If you don't send money, at least drop me some Email and let me know that you are using the program and benefitting from it (if you're not benefitting from it, tell me why so I can fix it!). Enjoy! Keith Ledbetter AdMenu v3.0 Page 8 Keith Ledbetter's Software Catalog Keith Ledbetter's Software Catalog ---------------------------------- Listed below is a chart of my other shareware and freeware utilities, along with the current version number of each. Also listed is the filename that you will find them under on BBS systems (please note that they may be different on your favorite BBS's, but it should help you at least get close to locating them). When you register one of my Shareware programs, you will receive a disk with ALL of these utilities on it. Filename Version Description ----------- ------- ------------------------------- SST_52A.ZIP 5.2a The ultimate file-finder program. Until recently this was simply called "WhereIs". It's now been renamed to "Supersonic Search Tool" to avoid confusion with other programs. Shareware: $15 LCD_21A.ZIP 2.1a "Led's Change Directory" is an intelligent directory changing program. This program was voted one of "the 10 best utilities of 1990" by the "Public (software) Library" magazine. Shareware: $15 AV_12.ZIP 1.2 "Archive Viewer" is used to display the names of members of all of the popular archiving programs (ZIP, ARC, LHARC, PKARC, ZOO, PAK). No longer do you have to struggle remembering the syntax to 6 different archiving programs. Freeware: $0 X_30.ZIP 3.0 "X: The Executioner" can save you a lot of disk space. X allows you to ZIP down those seldom-used-but-hard-to-delete .COM, .EXE, and .BAT files into one system "Command Library". You can then execute them easily by simply typing an "x" in front of the command line (eg: "x chkdsk c:"). Freeware: $0 ADMENU30.ZIP 3.0 If you own an Adlib Music card, you need this program. It allows you to ZIP down all of those .ROL song files you've accumulated, yet still play them with no extra effort! Uses a mouse-able, easy-on-the-eyes window system. Freeware: $0 DELDIR12.ZIP 1.2 "Delete Directory" allows you to delete an AdMenu v3.0 Page 9 Keith Ledbetter's Software Catalog entire directory (and all directories under it) with one quick command. You will be shown totals of what you are about to delete and then be asked to confirm (the confirm process can be over-ridden from the command line). Freeware: $0 DIRSIZ11.ZIP 1.1 "Directory Size Information" allows you to easily determine the total size (in both files and bytes) of any directory. Freeware: $0 DUPICO10.ZIP 1.0 "Duplicate Icon Deleter" is for any Windows 3.0 user who has accumulated tons of icons. It will go through a directory and delete all duplicate icon images, regardless of what they are named. Freeware: $0 TIMER10.ZIP 1.0 This program allows you to easily time the execution of any program. Simply use TIMER to invoke the command (eg: "timer chkdsk C:") and you will be shown, at the completion of the command, the elapsed time. Freeware: $0 UNTAB10.ZIP 1.0 One of the fastest "un-tab" programs you will find. It takes the specified input file and copies it to the specified output file, replacing all tab characters with hard blanks (you specify the "tab size"). Freeware: $0 You can download all of these files from the Blue Ridge Express in Richmond, VA. This is the official tech support board for all of my software, and there's a special "Keith Ledbetter" message section where you can quickly get your questions answered. Once you log on, just do a "J KEITHL" to join my sub-board. The Blue Ridge Express is a first-class BBS, with 26 phone lines; no need to worry about getting a busy signal! The number is: The Blue Ridge Express BBS 804-790-1675 End of document. ----------------end-of-author's-documentation--------------- Software Library Information: This disk copy provided as a service of Public (software) Library We are not the authors of this program, nor are we associated with the author in any way other than as a distributor of the program in accordance with the author's terms of distribution. 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For a copy of the latest monthly software library newsletter and a list of the 3,000+ disks in the library, call or write Public (software) Library P.O.Box 35705 - F Houston, TX 77235-5705 1-800-2424-PSL MC/Visa/AmEx/Discover Outside of U.S. or in Texas or for general information, Call 1-713-524-6394 PsL also has an outstanding catalog for the Macintosh.