Trialling DOpus 9

Help & Support
1

Hello,

I'm into the third week of trialling DO9 and am finding it a bit of a slog -- far too many options for my liking.

I had Windows Explorer set up to play MP3s with Irfanview with a double left-mouse click, and changed that in DO9 to check out its player. I didn't like its player (due to a lack of a volume control) and wanted to return to using Irfanview, to no avail, although the settings all point to Irfanview being the software to play MP3s. When I now double left-click on an MP3 file, nothing happens, and have to right-click to select Open from the context menu instead.

I've looked but can find no "restore defaults" button anywhere in DO9, so that the product behaves the same way it did when I first installed it.

Compared to Windows Explorer, DO9 seems unnecessarily complex to me, and I've been using computers since 1982.

Can anyone help with the above, or should I simply reinstall the software to continue my trial?

Thanks,

Moochie

2

I am in the same boat.

The best way I have found to get your head around the beast is to visit the FAQs page here and then to grab a few of the "HOW TO" entries and to study them.

Anything there by "leo" should help, although these often assume a bit of basic knowledge.

If you work through one or two of those, you may begin to get a handle on the underlying philosophy.

Also, read the PDF file rather than the Help file. It is easier to search and navigate. although one or two bits (such as the Appendix) don't actually make it into the index of the PDF file.

When it comes to volume controls on the "preview" window, my keyboard does the job.

But try this as an experiment, on the menu go to

Settings>>Preferences>>Plugins>>Viewers

If you uncheck the entry for mp3 files, you will prevent the "native" viewer from playing these files.

When I do this, the "Viewer Pane" that crops up does have a volume control.

How this works for you will depend on what else you have that will take on the job. For example, as my "Multiview" entry in that slow, I have QuickView Plus. This may well be picking up the role as mp3 player.

You may have something else that is up to the task.

As to the association of mp3 files, you also need to check:

Settings>>File Types>>System File Types

There are all manner of settings to play with in there.

All this has to carry a health warning. This is just another newcomer's suggestions. Like you, I am a beginner. But that does mean that I perhaps have a better understanding than some of your state of puzzlement.

3

What did you do in Opus to change things? Without knowing that it's difficult to know what to suggest in order to undo the change.

If you want to completely restore everything to the defaults then the easiest way is to uninstall Opus and then reinstall it. The uninstaller will wipe your configuration.

Individual aspects of the configuration can also be restored but without knowing what you changed it's difficult to be more specific.

Explorer has about 30 options and, in general, assumes that everyone is going to be happy with how it works out-of-the-box. Opus probably has 300 options, not to mention customizable toolbars and so on, and assumes that people want to be able to configure things in detail. That level of configuration brings with it inherent complexity, or at least inherent searching around in the Preferences window for a while until you get used to which options are where.

Using Opus is as easy as using Explorer, since most things (drag & drop, navigating folders, etc.) work in essentially the same way. Configuring Opus is obviously more complex than Explorer because Explorer can barely be configured at all. (Unless you include the hundreds of hidden registry settings which Explorer uses, in which case I'd argue that configuring Explorer is actually more complex than configuring Opus. So complex that people usually don't even think about it as part of Explorer.)

If you stick with it you should find it is worth it, though, because the amount of things which can be configured in Opus mean you can generally configure things exactly as you want them and not as someone else thinks you want them.

If you haven't done so already, check out the Tutorials section of this site (especially my Getting To Know Directory Opus tutorial) and the FAQs list, and don't be afraid to ask questions. Someone will usually answer pretty quickly. There are also some tutorials in the Rename Scripting part of this site, should you be interested in learning about batch renaming lots of files.

4

And having done that use Settings -> Backup and Restore to backup your settings before changing something so you can restore the previous settings if you don't like the change.

5

This question made me go back and try to pin down exactly what is playing mp3 files in the DOpus viewer here.

It is the ActiveX Plugin. Which seems to be woven by leo.

I found this out by disabling everything else.

Within that plugin, the mp3 link is through the "Generic ActiveX" setting. That is probably the default as I don't know enough to mess around with those settings.

All this depends on what the original message meant by the DO Player. It doesn't mention the preview pane.

Changing the Play "button" in DOpus back to Irfanview, or whatever, and using the Preview pane in DOPus for checking and managing mp3 files seems like a good option.

Note to original poster, if you are using the trial through the "incentive pricing" for Explorer Plus users, you've missed the really cheap deal and now have to rely on something slightly less generous.

6

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. After spending more hours than I care to "tinkering" with various settings, and achieving nothing that I wanted, I've decided to give DO a miss and stick with Explorer -- it does everything I want it to (my experiences with DO have actually made me look more closely at Explorer and learn more of its settings and how to use them), and in conjunction with IrfanView, which works in and out of Explorer, I have all I really need in terms of an instant music/video/photo player.

Not that I don't think DO is a great program -- it is -- but it's clearly designed for those who like to tinker endlessly with the "300" settings on offer, whereas I want software that pretty much does what I want with a minimum of fuss.

I gave DO a try on the recommendation of Charles Wright, who writes a tech column in The Age, Melbourne's premier broadsheet, and whose word I tend to trust. Mr Wright is also a past president of the Melbourne PC User Group, of which I've been a member since 1988. I think in this case Mr Wright may have simply given a plug to a homegrown product without having delved into it very much, which is fine, but not very helpful.

Again, thanks to all your responses,

Kind regards,

Moochie

7

And having done that use Settings -> Backup and Restore to backup your settings before changing something so you can restore the previous settings if you don't like the change.[/quote]
This bit of sound advice made me wonder why DOpus doesn't come with just such a "backup" of the "out of the box" settings.

Maybe it isn't possible. Maybe it does and no one has mentioned it.

It also suggests that, if there isn't a "bundled" backup, in line with this advice, it would be a good idea to create one before doing anything with the thing.

This is not usually the advice that newcomers to a package will receive. Perhaps it might put them off.

8

rcoleman1943's advice wasn't about backing up the factory default settings but about backing up the current settings before resetting to the factory defaults, in case it turned out something from the current settings was wanted after all.

There's not much point creating a backup of the default settings when it's easy to go back to them, unless it's something you plan to do a lot for some reason.

Advising people to backup their personal settings every so often in case they make a mess of things seems like good advice to me. Perhaps the reason you don't hear it more often when it comes to other products is a combination of very few other products offering a configuration backup feature at all, and most products having such simple configurations that there isn't much point backing them up. :slight_smile:

9

Nothing to disagree with there. But it does, as usual, make me think a stage or two further.

I use a bunch of products that do offer a backup feature. My favourite always on, must have, utilities (Clipmate and MacroExpress) build it into their modus operandi.

These two are even more likely to change between sessions. But mostly, as you say, not much happens.

Other software often stores its stuff in places that let me use my usual backup software, SyncBack, which also has a built-in backup routine, preserve a "why the f**k did I do that" version. As someone who once got struck by lightning, I am paranoid about losing work, so I have several copies of everything in bomb-proof places.

10

You can automate Opus backups by just backing up its config directory, since all the settings are in files.

I backup my whole C-drive every night which obviously includes my Opus config (and stuff like my Firefox profile, which is handy when Firefox decides to corrupt it :slight_smile:).