After playing with my empeg for two weeks, I concluded we really need some search functionality improvements (already mentioned by others, mostly):

- Searching within the titles, not just from the beginning (that gets rid, among others, of 'The' problem, first/last name problem etc). I don't know how difficult is this to implement within 'T9' search.
- Case insensitive search
- Search for playlists, not only tunes
- Drill-down and multiple selection
- Insert after current, not only select/append

Cheers!

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

- Case insensitive search

seconded

- Search for playlists, not only tunes

seconded

- Drill-down and multiple selection

seconded

- Insert after current, not only select/append

seconded

Murray 06000047
____________________

Searching within the titles, not just from the beginning (that gets rid, among others, of 'The' problem, first/last name problem etc).

It already skips the "The" automatically, as well as foreign variants such as "La". (That really impressed me when I noticed it.). So, for "The Pretenders", you can safely start with "P", for example. But for "Paula Cole" you can't start with "C", you have spell the first name, too.

I think there's a good reason it doesn't do a full substring-search: If it did, you'd get too many search hits and you'd have to press too many letters to get to what you wanted. As it stands right now, you can usually find the title or artist you're looking for with three or four letters. If they made it a substring search, it'd be more like 6-10 letters. Since this is meant to be used in the car, they have to make it as few keystrokes as possible.

As for the other things you mentioned, those have all been brought up elsewhere in the wish list forum, and I agree that they would all make good additions.

___________
Tony Fabris

I think there's a good reason it doesn't do a full substring-search: If it did, you'd get too many search hits and you'd have to press too many letters to get to what you wanted. As it stands right now, you can usually find the title or artist you're looking for with three or four letters. If they made it a substring search, it'd be more like 6-10 letters. Since this is meant to be used in the car, they have to make it as few keystrokes as possible.

I disagree, I think. If it added substring matches down the bottom of the list, then you wouldn't care about all those false positives, because you'd never see them, unless you wanted to. It would also fix the case of when you're searching for a song, but you've forgotten about the first word. At the moment if you're looking for "Back to Mother Earth", and you search for "Mother Earth", you get nothing. If you add all substring matches at the end, then you get no UI penalty (the existing button presses will still work) but you get a benefit (now you can select tunes with substrings). There may be a performance penalty, though.

I've held off on this comment for a while because Hugo keeps saying things like "In the next revision, the whole searching / playlist ui will be completely revamped, and you'll love it". Perhaps this will do a lot towards addressing all these issues.

Richard.

Umm, I don't think I said searching would be revamped. Case insensitive is in there, yes, but not substring search. This would slow it down quite a bit I suspect, but it might be something we can play with & see how well it works.

Hugo

Umm, I don't think I said searching would be revamped. Case insensitive is in there, yes, but not substring search. This would slow it down quite a bit I suspect, but it might be something we can play with & see how well it works.

My apologies. It's been a while, and I guess I can't accurately remember which bits you said were being reworked.

In that case, here are some other search related things I'd like.
- as above in this thread
- remove tracks from the current playlist based on the results of a search (both "remove matches" and "keep only matches")
- have a "tweak search", that searches only within the current playlist, and moves the result to just after the current track.

These ones have some UI implications, of course, which I haven't thought about yet. The substring one doesn't though.

Richard.