MM4 feature missing ... FIND

[dtsig]

The 'find' feature, as i call it, is different than a search. A search will return only those tracks where the entered string exists (anywhere).

The 'find' feature in MM4 works like this. click the artist (sorted on artist) and enter B. the list scrolls to the first artist starting with B. It does not remove any tracks nor find B anywhere. Just to the first artist starting with B. Enter E and it jumps to The Beach Boys. Then enter A and it moves to the next track with Bea ... another Beach Boys. Then enter T and it jumps to The Beatles. If I had entered a S instead of T it would have gone to Beastie Boys instead.

This process works in Albums, Genre and Artist. Probably in other columns as well.

I had asked about this when alpha was first released and someone make a script that was supposed to do it. But if i remember right the script went to the first B anywhere in the track data. This is not right.

Can we please get this feature back ... it is very important for me and makes my life much happier

[Barry4679]

The 'find' feature in MM4 works like this. click the artist (sorted on artist) and enter B. the list scrolls to the first artist starting with B. It does not remove any tracks nor find B anywhere. Just to the first artist starting with B. Enter E and it jumps to The Beach Boys. Then enter A and it moves to the next track with Bea ... another Beach Boys. Then enter T and it jumps to The Beatles. If I had entered a S instead of T it would have gone to Beastie Boys instead.
[snip]
Can we please get this feature back ... it is very important for me and makes my life much happier

I looks to me that some aspects of this feature has been implemented in MM5, but the implementation is inconvenient IMO.

Set Contextual Search at Tools|Options|Library|Search to "scroll to matches"

Open a track list, eg. EntireLibrary>All Tracks in List View mode

Click on a column heading, eg. Album ... the display is sorted accordingly
Type something, eg. bea ... the display scrolled to next track which has any word starting, in the album tag, starting with "bea"
Press Ctrl&Down to scroll to the next occurrence

yeah, it is not exactly what you want ... it matches any word, beginning with your your search string, in the the column that you have selected, not just the first word ... also you have to type the whole search string at once, ie. you can't type b and then refine by typing e, etc

but the real buzz kill (IMO) is that you have have to reconfigure to turn off filter (vs scroll) searches ... they should find a way to be able to use either, without re configuring ... eg. click on a column heading and type something => a scroll .... vs. click in the grid and type something => a filter

Or better still,maybe have some control key to toggle search mode between scroll and filter ... they could have a control on the the tool bar which indicates the current search mode ... and a tool tip could display the current search string, and remind you of the cntrl&arrow navigation key combo when in scroll mode

It would be good if we could restrict matches to just the beginning of the tag value ... eg. bea would find both Beach Boys and also Grizzly Bear ... but Bea just finds Beach Boys

There also seems to be a bug: I can't have repeated adjacent letters in the search criteria ... ie. cannot filter to oo ... it just filters to a single o ... so if we want to search on roll, we are forced to search on rol, which means that "roland" is mixed up amongst "rolling" etc

[dtsig]

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I will try you suggestion as I didn't know about it. Will reply tomorrow on that.
I agree that there is a lot in this area that needs to be looked at. Searching and 'Find' or scrolling as you call it .. probably a better term .. needs to be enhanced and made more user friendly.
Thanks for the tips

[Ludek]

Thanks for the feedback, this is tracked as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view ... 077#c51038 and will be improved in upcoming builds.

[dtsig]

thanks for that .. i hope that the feature comes back working as well as it does in 4