ok, i've been browsing the forum for half an hour trying to figure this out and i'm getting frustrated so i'm just posting yet another question...
my music folder is filled with subfolders that are designated to artists. within the artist folders are album folders, and within the album folders are mp3s. pretty basic setup.
My Music > Artist > Album > Song.mp3
i want them set up as follows:
My Music: list
Artist folders: thumbnail
Album folders: detail
i can get the album folders to display detail using Content Type Formats. but i can't get the others set right.
i tried setting the whole My Music folder and all subfolders to thumbnail, then changing just the My Music folder (and not the subfolders) to list, but somehow list gets distributed to all subfolders anyway. what??
if i set each Artist folder to thumbnails manually then it sticks, but going through 120 folders is a lot of work!
there's probably an easy way to do this but it's eluding me. as powerful as Opus is, it sure isn't the most intuitive bit of software out there...
If you have just Music -> Albums -> Song.mp3 -- i.e. all albums in one place and no Artist sub-directories -- then you can cheat by setting the Albums & all sub-folders to use Detail, then creating a button, style or layout which takes you to the Albums folder using Thumbnails mode.
(i.e. If you go to Albums by navigating normally it will show as Details, but you navigate to it via a button/style/layout instead which will override the view mode for just that directory.)
That's no use if you have an Artists level in your hierarchy, though.
See the Folder Formats FAQ, and look at what each of the actions you described does as a result.
If you save a format for My Music that applies to all subfolders then you'll see you only add one folder format to the list in Preferences. It's for My Music (of course) and it has the Use as the default format for all sub-folders checkbox set.
If you then save (update) the format for My Music again, but for that folder only, then you will overwrite the My Music format, this time without that checkbox set.
i had a look at your FAQ before i posted and saw the bit about the hierarchy, so i thought there was no way to do this, but i had to ask anyway. seems like a pretty serious limitation, i hope it's being looked into!
now, if we could just set the format for multiple folders simultaneously, it would be a piece of cake to fix this. that's probably the easiest solution. for me it'd just be a matter of CTRL-A, but in more complex cases, a File Collection could help...
Do you really want to have to manually save a new format every time you create a new album folder (or two formats every time you add a new album for a new artist) and have to manually manage hundreds of folder formats?
That doesn't seem like an ideal solution to me, though this problem may not have an ideal solution at all...
I like the idea of formats that apply to wildcard (and/or regular-expression) paths so they can match multiple folders. Like a format for C:\My Music** that would apply to all Album folders in your example. Just one format to manage and it would apply to new folders automatically. Would people understand wildcard format paths, though? I don't know.
haha well of course i don't want to manage that many folders manually. anyway i have other ways of organizing my music, so i don't think i'll actually go through with it...
would people understand wildcard paths? well i imagine that anyone who is going that deep into customizing their alternate file manager probably understands a thing or two
you do have to be quite computer literate, or at least quite dedicated, to do most things in Opus. it has a target audience, and that audience, i think, would do fine with wildcards.
it's a good idea by the way. but however it functions, i think it should definitely be implemented.
i used the other file manager i'm testing to multi-paste a dummy file called x.x into all of my artist folders.
i made a new File Type Group called Dummy that consists of the .x file format.
i used this new Dummy format to create a Content Type Format. i set the view mode to Thumbnails and i set the filter to hide all .x files.
it works great! it's a hack work-around but it's better than setting all my Artist folders as exceptions...
this method could come in handy down the road. the only caveat is that even if you set the Content Threshold to 1%, you still need 1 dummy file for ever 99 other files for the Content Type Format to kick in. but they're zero-byte files and they're easily hidden so that's not such a bad thing.
Select the folders you want to copy into then click the button. It will ask you which file you want to copy into them and then do it.
Only good for copying one file, and all the copies happen in parallel, but those two things should be fine in this case. You could also hardcode the source file into the button to create a 1-click way to put the dummy file into all the selected folders.
