Author Topic: Foobar-style search in library  (Read 2573 times)

maxoblasto

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I want to ditch foobar2k but this is pretty much the only thing keeping me on it. In musicbee, if I start typing a word in the library, it will find the first thing based on the currently sorted album. For example, if I have my library sorted by album and type 'j-a-z', it'll stop at the first album entry for 'jazz album'  and that's all. In foobar however, I can type 'j-a-z' and it will find the first song, artist or album containing those letters, even if its in the middle of the word, so I can type 'j-a-z-z' and have it land on 'jazz album', or I can type 'j-a-z-z-y' and have it highlight 'jazzy song' in 'other album'.

Its a very useful function that I use all the time. Very easy to find a specific song you want to hear and just have it shuffle into the rest of the library, unlike musicbee now where if you want to do this, you have to either change your whole sorting to search by title/artist/etc, type in an album and search through it to find the song you're looking for, or use the musicbee search to find it, then go back to the full library when you're done to listen to everything else.


hiccup

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Welcome to the forum maxoblasto.

My first thought is that the search bar has exactly that purpose.
But indeed when you press the x button to clear the search term, not only the search field is cleared, but also the main panel gets reset.

I am not sure if that is intentional, and in my opinion it should not do that and just return to the selection as it was before performing the search.
Would it solve your issue if that was changed?

Zak

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Yeah, I'm not really following either. This sounds like what the search field already does.
Bee excellent to each other...

hiccup

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Yeah, I'm not really following either. This sounds like what the search field already does.
I think it might boil down to this:

…But indeed when you press the x button to clear the search term, not only the search field is cleared, but also the main panel gets reset.
I am not sure if that is intentional, and in my opinion it should not do that and just return to the selection as it was before performing the search.
Let's await what others (or the OP) think about this.

Shy Guy on Wheels

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I don't think this is relevant to the actual search function. I think this implies that when viewing a set of tracks, if you type in something foobar will jump to anything that has those letters on display anywhere, while MusicBee will specifically jump to the thing that starts with those letters in how it's being sorted. As an example, if a playlist is sorted manually, you can't jump to anything by typing in the keyboard, while foobar has no problem with this.

maxoblasto

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I don't think this is relevant to the actual search function. I think this implies that when viewing a set of tracks, if you type in something foobar will jump to anything that has those letters on display anywhere, while MusicBee will specifically jump to the thing that starts with those letters in how it's being sorted. As an example, if a playlist is sorted manually, you can't jump to anything by typing in the keyboard, while foobar has no problem with this.

This is what I'm talking about. Its less about searching and more about being able to jump anywhere in the library.

Welcome to the forum maxoblasto.

My first thought is that the search bar has exactly that purpose.
But indeed when you press the x button to clear the search term, not only the search field is cleared, but also the main panel gets reset.

I am not sure if that is intentional, and in my opinion it should not do that and just return to the selection as it was before performing the search.
Would it solve your issue if that was changed?

That'd be getting close. I'd probably be fine if when you searched for a song and selected it, it wouldn't make its own playlist out of the search terms and instead acted the same as if you selected the song from the library. That along with jumping to the selected song in the library list once the search is cleared.

Steven

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i was playing around with the in-panel search in foobar to see if i liked it better than the MB implementation.
Say if there were 3 songs with "Gold" in the album name, and the first instance has been matched - how do you make it search for the next instance?

maxoblasto

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i was playing around with the in-panel search in foobar to see if i liked it better than the MB implementation.
Say if there were 3 songs with "Gold" in the album name, and the first instance has been matched - how do you make it search for the next instance?

You can continue typing to narrow it down, so if you had "Gold One", "Gold Two", "Gold Three", etc. you'd type g-o-l-d-[space]-t and it'd jump to Gold Two, and an h after that would jump to Three. There's problems if you have albums with the same name, but you could always search by song title or artist in those cases.

*Edit: Forgot to also add that you can also ctrl+F in foobar and it brings up a small search window that you can use, and clicking a search result jumps you there in the library
Last Edit: October 05, 2022, 08:51:00 AM by maxoblasto

Mr.man1093

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i was playing around with the in-panel search in foobar to see if i liked it better than the MB implementation.
Say if there were 3 songs with "Gold" in the album name, and the first instance has been matched - how do you make it search for the next instance?
You could make it so that when you press the tab key or any other assigned hotkey it cycles to the next item containing the same search phrase.