search in playlist too cumbersome

[DaledeSilva]

the ability to run an advanced search and specify which playlist to search in (the same way you would with an autoplaylist).. is so cumbersome for a search that it would probably be quicker to just find the track manually in the playlist 'most' of the time.

personally.. I would prefer the standard search work relative to whatever was in the track view.. but this changes how the search operates quite far and so I assume it won't be implemented..

.. therefore, instead, allow the user to right click on any playlist (or maybe even node) and choose "search this node", upon clicking, an advanced search dialog pops up with that playlist already as one of the criteria.

Dale.

[rusty]

Not sure what you mean.

With this version you can:
i) look at a track's properties to see whether it's a member of a playlist
ii) construct an autoplaylist consisting of tracks that are members of playlists (useful for constructing a mix of playlists)

Note: we still hope to add context-sensitive search to 3.0.

-Rusty

[DaledeSilva]

well I assume that the "context sensitive" search you mention will probalby solve what I'm talking about anyway... but I'll explain it again (and I've also edited my post above because there were some grammatical errors which may have made it hard to understand.

i) look at a track's properties to see whether it's a member of a playlist
ii) construct an autoplaylist consisting of tracks that are members of playlists (useful for constructing a mix of playlists)

I'm aware of both of these points and they work very well.. What I'm talkinga bout is general searches.

Autoplaylists are things you set up for the future.. so it's okay if it takes you a couple of minutes to set up (eg.. going into advanced tab and selecting "playlist is" and then selecting the playlist... and then typing in the text to search for.

however, the point of doing a once off search is to make it quicker than scrolling through the tracklist and manually finding the song.. yet, if wanting to search WITHIN a playlist, it often isn't quicker - as you have to set it up just as you would an autoplaylist.

Dale.

[DaledeSilva]

rusty... since I've noticed you've been playing with winamp for another thread (to compare I guess), can I prompt you to try out a plugin for winamp... it's called "mexp" (http://www.mexp.dk/)

this plugin provides a different library that doesn't do alot of the whizzbang stuff that winamp's library is starting to do (like synchronize to ipod and smart views, etc.)... but it has an extremely fast database and has some really cool features that I'll list below:

1. search is always context sensitive (unless you have the option checked to always jump back to the root node upon searching)
2. search has logical operations (including NOT)
3. TYPING ANY WHERE IN THE TRACKLIST WILL AUTOMATICALLY JUMP THE CURSOR TO THE SEARCH BOX - this is so valuable for efficiency (though it really should be an option - maybe a checkbox next to the contextsearch) - I would LOVE to see this in MM.

as well as other things; from being able to define the node heirarchies to seeing a preview of the filestructure before commiting to autoorganise to being able to see the album covers in the tree itself (I like MM's way better of this particular thing).


Dale.