I'm thinking PortableApps is a good method for making an effective autorun solution for an MP3 CD. Would CoolPlayer be the best choice for this?
VLC is a pretty good media player, but takes too long to start up. Not sure about XMPlay, I wasn't using it (in favor of VLC, once I realized it played music too) so I took it off, but it was nice when I used it. Compact and it looked good. I've seen some nice skins for it, too.
The ideal solution would be to be able to put the disc in the drive and have Windows offer to Play Music with CoolPlayer (or whatever app), and if you choose that, the app comes up -- and loads all the media on the disc in a playlist. It would be OK to have to make a playlist ahead of time, using .m3u since it can use relative subdirectories (I suppose we'd be pointing to, say, ..\..\..\music\song.mp3).
Of course the user would be able to decline this action and just copy the files off the disc and/or play them with their own media player. That's fine too.
How would you do something like this, if you were to at all?
Documentation
and scroll down to the last paragraph.
That sounds awesome, but does it play music as well? Stupid question, I know, any video player should be able to play audio as well (especially since video files use Mp3, WMA, and other audio formats for the audio channel) but I haven't got SMPlayer on my flash drive to check.
If so, this sounds like what I need.
plays MP3 fine.