Yes, you can alter the sorting in any of the
Media Views, and make your own with a structure as you see fit.
Jim's point, and it is probably a good one, is that you'd be better off importing the data from your file and foldername structure (which you can do in an automated fashion) and use the power of MC's database to construct new, better, ways to browse your media.
This thread would be a good place to start on how to import the metadata contained within your existing file and foldername structure.
However, that said... Yes, you definitely can alter your Media Views to allow you to browse by file and foldernames, sort by [Date Created] and [Date Modified] and other similar methods.
A good place to start might be using the default
Audio > Files Media View. Make a copy of it so that you don't modify the original:
1. In the
Tree, drag the
Files Media View and drop it on the Audio node.
2. From the context menu that pops up, choose Copy.
3. This will create a new, duplicate of that Media View in your Tree, called "Files (1)" or something like that. Select it, right-click, and choose
Customize View.
4. In the dialog that appears, you can change all aspects of the view. Under
Set Rules for File Display, you can use the
Search Wizard interface to alter what files show up in the view (with a Search) and what order they show up in (with the Modifications to that Search). Sorting files by [Date Modified]-d will sort them in descending order with the newest dated files "on top" in the view.
5. Likewise, you can alter the sorting for the Panes shown at the top of the View. To do this, click Edit on the Category you'd like to alter on the left-side of the Customize View dialog, under
Show Categories in this Order. Select the pane you'd like to change, click Edit, and then select a Sorting under the Sorting dropdown combobox at the bottom of the dialog.
It provides a number of pre-defined sortings you can use, but if one of the built in ones isn't sufficient, you can make your own custom ones. Go back to the Search Wizard (it doesn't matter where, under
Set Rules for File Display within this Customize View dialog, or somewhere else in a Smartlist or whatever.) Add a file sorting for the order you want to the search, and then save that sorting as a
named Preset. Named Presets are available in the sorting drop-down for Categories in the Customize View dialog, so you can make your own with whatever order you prefer.
So, you can make your File Folder browsing pane in the Files View, sort by [Date Modified], or [Date Created], or [Date Imported], if you want.
It is worth mentioning that MC doesn't care at all about the
folders themselves on disk, as they aren't really "things" just parts of a path to the imported files to it. When it is showing you the Files browser pane, it is really just navigating this heirarchy of path structure, not actually "opening" the folders themselves on disk. So it will sort the folders within the pane based on the most recent file modified date of Imported files
within those folders, ignoring the [Date Modified] of any non-imported file. But that should do what you want.
There's no reason it has to be done with a Panes-based View, however. You can change that too. Try switching your test view to Categories mode, rather than Panes, for example. Change
View As from Panes to Categories in the Customize View dialog (on the left), and see how the View changes.
You can make as many of these Media Views as you want, in whatever structure you want, and they can be filtered to show only, exactly the media you want, with exactly the metadata you want exposed.