# Preferences - File List

You can keep the system default white background, have an alternating line background or you can choose a custom background color. The text color will appropriately be set to black or white.

You can choose to draw a grid around the cells in the main table display. Partial Grid only draws the grid on occupied rows. Full Grid draws the grid everywhere. You can choose to make the grid darker by selecting the Bold option.

Disable Artwork panel when tracks in multiple folders are selected is also a safety feature. When checked, it will restrict the editing of artwork when selected tracks are not in the same folder. It will also disable the dragging of artwork to the main file list area. When an artwork editing control is disabled by this setting a lock icon will be displayed.

Yate provides formatters to force the Year field to be an integer less than or equal to 9999. This is in line with the way iTunes handles data entry for the Year field. If you want to have Year fields which are fully qualified dates such as YYYY-MM-DD, you can set the Do not force formatting of the Year field option. Note that when the option is set, the contents of the field are not validated to be a properly formatted date. Changing this option only takes effect the next time Yate is started.

If for any reason you wish to be able to set Replace the File List while in Playlist Mode you must enable the Allow Playlist-Replace Open Mode option.

You can elect to have open databases updated whenever you Save files. Note this option is equivalent to selecting File>Databases>Update Databases whenever a Save, (File or context menu), is issued. The option has no effect when saving from an action statement, closing files, or quitting the application.

When Use Natural Sorting is set, leading words such as 'The', 'An and 'A' will be ignored when sorting the Album, Album Artist, Artist, Conductor, Composer, Lyricist, Original Album, Original Artist, Original Lyricist, and Title fields. The list of words to be ignored is in the Exception Natural Sort list, identified by an S in the Preference-Exceptions set table.

When Use sort fields when sorting is set, the Sort Album, Sort Title, Sort Artist, Sort Album Artist and Sort Composer fields, if they exist will be used as a replacement for their non sort equivalents when sorting. Note that if a sort field exists it will override natural sorting as described above.

You can have Yate automatically scroll a track to be visible in the main file list when its state changes. This will happen during saves, when linking to iTunes, etc. If you would like this to be enabled, set the Follow file state change option. Setting the Smooth option will make the scrolling less jumpy but does have a performance cost.

When tabbing to a single line control, the Yate default implementation deselects all text and positions the insertion point to the end of the field. If you prefer the system default of selecting all text in the field, enable the Select field contents when tabbing option. Note that multi-line fields such as Comments, Musicians Credits and Involved People are not affected by this options.

The Editing State by default has various automatic set and clear criteria. You can elect to make the setting and clearing of the Editing State largely manual. You can also elect to automatically set the editing state before starting an action. See The Editing State for more information.

You can configure the Combined Credits Editor via the Combined Credits Editor Settings - Configure button .

You can configure the padding of track numbers, track counts, disc numbers and disc counts. You set the padding via the Disc / Track Padding - Configure button.

You can map three UDTIs to columns in the main file list. This provides an easy means of viewing and editing the contents of UDTIs that you heavily use. You assign the UDTIs to column mappings by means of the Column Mappings and Custom Fields - Configure button. To display a mapped column, right click on the file list table's column header and enabled Mapping 1, Mapping 2 or Mapping 3.

Yate has ten custom fields. These fields are not displayed on any of the default content editing panels. The fields may be displayed in the main file list and can be assigned to custom content editing panels. The custom fields are represented as Custom 0, ... Custom 9 from any field chooser. You can assign display names to these fields. The display names will be used as column headers in the main file list and as labels on custom content editing panels. You set the display names via the Column Mappings and Custom Fields - Configure button.

In FLAC files, Yate supports the mapping of all its fields to any named FLAC comment. In FLAC files the ten custom fields may be mapped in the same manner as any other field. This is done in Preferences - FLAC Mappings. Due to the different nature of their audio file containers, ID3 based files and MPEG-4 files have largely fixed field mappings. However, being able to configure the mappings for the ten custom fields is useful if you want to map to fields implemented by other applications. You can modify the mappings of ID3 based files and MPEG-4 files via the Column Mappings and Custom Fields - Configure button.

Yate has an extensive context menu in the main file list table. While only currently valid items are displayed there might still be menu items that you are never interested in seeing. You can disable context menu items via the Context menu items - Configure button.

Yate preference files can be imported by the Yate>Import Preferences... menu item or by dragging the preference plist file to the file list. The Dragged preference file import settings - Configure button lets you set what and how items get imported. Note than items which are not enabled for import are simply ignored when a file is imported. You can always see the type of content in a Yate preference file via the Yate>Examine Preference File Contents... menu item. Alternately you can drag a plist file while holding down the Shift key to the file list area.

You can customize column display attributes via the Customize column display attributes - Configure button. You can set the alignment and crop location of each column.