The only problem with it (as I mentioned in another post in the Technical section) is that, while it's cool for remotely controlling a system, it's not really suitable for scripting remote control. There's no readable response codes that a script can trap to know that, yes, I really did select Alan Parsons. If another album got inserted without your knowing it, you may have just selected your wife's Abba collection (urgh!)

In theory a kernel hack could achieve this as it could read the screen to see where it had got in the menus. However I'm not sure if there is going to be enough spare CPU available on the box to do this sort of thing.

I am thinking of a different approach to this. I and a friend are planning to write our own server software for the Receiver (yes, I know there are a couple of projects out there already, but we wanted a good project to cut our .NET teeth on).

Once you have our own server software that can serve up dynamic list of tracks (as against the static list that the normal server software does) then you could achieve this sort of scripting. The way it would work was this:

- you have a special artist name that would always appear at the bottom of the list of artists
- you would hack the kernel to add a http server (I am already planning to add this to my port of the VolAdj patch) that can accept data to be inserted into the IR stream
- when a scripting action occurs you have the server send a series of commands to the Receiver that makes it go into the artists menu and select the special artist
- the receiver then requests the list of artist's tracks from the server
- the server gives the receiver the dynamic lists of tracks that the user wanted
- the server waits and then sends the commands to the Receiver the select "All music" for the artist (the server could also use the web server on the Receiver to peek at the screen to check when it was ready for the "All music" command)

The benefit of this is that most of the logic load is on the server.

Anyway, I'm afraid none of this is going to happen soon. Before I start on the server I need to add code to my Tweaked Receiver kernel (http://www.norman.cx/receiver/) so that you can control the VolAdj level.