>It's been mentioned in the forums I don't remember many conversations about search in all the time I've participated on the mailing list/forum.
>it's probably the #1 argument of people telling me what a crappy, >outdated system the Squeezebox system is. Really? Ridiculous! In the example given for searching "hurry love supremes" such that Phil Collins doesn't come up, what's the harm of searching for "hurry love" and selecting one of the two hits returned. It's quicker than also typing "supremes", especially on IR remote or touch keyboard! Or search for "Power of love" and get three hits (Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Jennifer Rush, Huey Lewis and the News). Not too taxing to select one of the three. But now it returns Sea Of Love by Cat Power, and curiously "4. Holier Than Thou (No Rest For The Best) - No Album - Frankie Goes To Hollywood" (why? "power of love" is not in any of the metadata - I think because it appears in the file path?). So even "power of love frankie" which is more typing, doesn't reduce the result set to one hit. >But people out there outside >this forum use things like Spotify, Google Music, Amazon, SoundCloud, >YouTube etc. and they are used to quite different standards than a >search logic devised a decade ago. > Well SoundCloud doesn't have albums, etc. Just a flat list of songs for a user account, so it's hardly a similar situation. I get that the modern generation don't play albums, they play songs and build playlists of songs. I probably come from a slightly older generation that prefers albums, as many of my albums flow as one continuous piece. Less of the 3 min pop song here, much of my music is progressive rock or electronic/ambient stuff. I guess the type of music and style it is listened to reflects on the types of searches that are required for a user. One type of search doesn't fit all. >> It would seem better to me to do it similar to other websites and >> applications. By default "Search All", but provide a Search Artists, >> Albums, or Songs that only searches the respective titles. >> >That's the "Advanced Search", isn't it? No. That's only available in web UI, and additional clicks. Advanced search is useful, and previously I would use this to run more specific queries. But I always know if I am looking for an album (most frequently) or an artist or song title. >Sure, that can get as complex, detailed, and specific as it wants to be, >that's what it's for. >Also, filters should be applied. > I don't need to find across all types of entities and then filter the larger list down, I already know what I'm looking for. This *is* a topic that has come up many times before in the forum about browsing, where people complain about browse hierarchies, sorting, filtering, etc, and many people say they don't bother, as they either play random music or search for the thing they are looking for rather than page through/scroll a large list. >That's probably how the search _should_ look like: you enter one term >and immediately get fulltext results and if that's not what you are >looking for you can apply filters to limit it to certain categories. > That's rather fiddly on different interfaces. eg. SB2 with IR remote. >That's what iTunes does, for example. > Well, it can be used that way. Search, get a load of stuff back, and then select items to filter results until you find what you want. But it also doesn't prioritise matches, it sticks to the chosen sort order. Perhaps useful if you don't know what you are looking for or just trying to select something semi-randomly to play, and I do see merit in it sometimes. But in iTunes, I still search for a specific artist, album or song title, less results returned, and I find what I specifically want quicker. In iTunes, i want to find In Rainbows by Radiohead: If I search all for "Rainbow", I get 192 songs, ordered and grouped by Album by Artist/Year. Scroll half way down results to find Radiohead/In Rainbows, or in column browser, scroll down list of artists to find Radiohead to filter results down further. If I search albums for "Rainbow", I get 7 albums, and In Rainbows is 3rd in the list. Much quicker. I see that I can disable full text search plugin to restore original behaviour. It's a bit radical, because although I prefer the old behaviour by default as this is better for my daily needs, the full text search is good and of benefit some of the time. I go back to what I thought earlier; leave Search Aritsts, Albums, Songs as they used to work, but add a "Search All" as the default search that performs the full text search. It's more consistent with all other sites and apps that provide this feature. _______________________________________________ beta mailing list beta@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
