Also, when dragging from explorer, chances are the files will be alphabetical, right?

Right, but only if you used a recent version of Emplode to do it. I think it needed to be 1.03 or later for folder-alphabetical, and 2.0 or later for all-files alphabetical. I'm not certain. Prior to those versions, the files went into emplode in whatever order Explorer fed it to them. Which brings me to your next point...

But you also probably know that when you drag a large selection from explorer they don't necessarily come to the host application in the same order

Right. And back in the old days, before Emplode ordered the files alphabetically, you had to do this to get them to drop in the correct order. (In that post, the explorer selection order is de-mystified.)

The most logical order to play things in soup views when you don't have additional db criteria is alphabetical.

Agreed, because at that point the player has no other sorting criteria to go on.

I'm just hoping the post-2.00 emplode will give us some easy way to feed it another criteria for tunes that are already in the player.