I've tried D.O. for a while and i think it's incredible. I could buy it because it's surely the best file manager around. But i've some suggestions for the developers to meet my needs:
Can you add more ID3tag fields to the MP3 preview (i.e. the embedded Cover image, the Lyric and so on, just to meet the ID3Tag ver.2 specifications? It could be great if the displaied fields could be defined by the user.
Can you enable the possibility to save the ID3 tags for multiple selected files, with a checkbox near the field the user wants to change for every files (like every MP3 taggers do)?
Can you add a plugin to play the selected mp3 files directly from Directory Opus, with a small player in the preview window (on in another optional window)? The player could be only a small connection to Winamp or Windows media player just to display the current song position, the song name (from TAG), and the player commands (Play, Stop, Pause and so on) and the volume controls. The possibility to choose the external player (WMP or Winamp) would be great.
In the "Find Panel" can you add the possibility to do searches for words in the Mp3 ID3Tags (title, artist and genre)?
I ask this because i've a large MP3 collection and i use an MP3 tagger but i would like to use Directory Opus like file manager and MP3 Tagger.
Your software is wonderful, and with those features...
Your first two suggestions seem reasonable. Right now Opus's music tagging is quite minimal (but still useful sometimes) so I still use separate tagging programs. They work fine but it would be nice to have it all inside Opus one day.
Opus already has a (very) simple MP3 player. Try the Play command (it's in the File Commands category under Customize). This is a little built-in player which works with MP3 and WAV files. It's not going to replace Foobar2000, Winamp, etc. but it can be useful for previewing a music file, esp. when you don't want to mess up the playlist in your proper music player.
(There was a thread a while back where someone couldn't get MP3 files to play using the Opus Play command. Not sure why it didn't work, though. I've just tried on a fresh WinXP Pro install and Opus plays MP3s out of the box.)
The internal player won't show you tags, just the filename. For WAV files it'll display a few extra details.
If you want something slightly differnet, I think you can add MP3 to the extensions handled by the ActiveX Document plugin (select it under Preferences, Plugins and click Configure). Having done that you can select an MP3 file and turn on the viewer pane to play it using Windows Media Player.
It's there already. Switch the Find Panel to Advanced mode, add a clause and set the first drop-down to Music; you can then select from various music fields including title, artist and genre.
Switch the Find Panel to