Search without losing position in list

[Gordon Bennett]

I often want to find a track among currently displayed. If I use the Search text box or Advanced Search or Column Browser it winnows the display down to only the results of search. I cannot find a track AND see the results among the list of all currently displayed tracks.

I thought perhaps I could search for a track, highlight the track, and then clear search to return to previous listing. However, the track is then deselected (and if I'm wrong here, there's still no easy way to find this selected track).

Ideally I would like to search for a track and for the current selected to jump to the first result of the search among all the currently listed tracks; and none of the currently listed tracks are removed.

Am I missing something?

[Mayibongwe]

Hi Gordon, welcome to the forum.

The main panel doesn't seem to support that kind of behaviour as you've pointed out.
You would need to use the Playing/Upcoming Tracks panel instead which seems to support that.

But help me understand something:
What is it that you'd wanna do with the track afterwards -- having located it and returning to the non-filtered listing -- that you cannot do whilst the search filter is on?

[Gordon Bennett]

You mentioned Playing/Upcoming tracks. This does not enable the kind of operations I want.

This is the scenario I find myself in:

I have a lot of tracks in different folders of my own recordings which I'm now in the belated process of tagging and generally sorting out.

I have a Main Panel Layout and View that shows a long list of all these tracks. I go through this list tagging and making other edits often in outside applications. The context of these tracks I'm editing is often important; I like to see the other tracks around the current track. That is, the entire list.

While I'm doing this I find that a particular track I edited earlier is not correct or needs further changes. I search for this particular track using Search text or Advanced Search. (Manually scrolling through list or using Column Browser/Jumpbar is often not possible.)

I find the track but the context of that track, i.e. the long list of tracks, is gone. The search ends in a list of files matching only the search criteria.

Furthermore, when I'm finished with this particular track, I want to return to my last position in the long list of tracks. This is not possible without manually searching.

It would be nice to have a particular kind of search that does not show *only* tracks matching search results, but simply goes to the first match in the long list of tracks, similar to the way a simple text editor like Notepad does.

Or, after a search to be able to Go Back to last selected track among long list of files.

Also nice would be a way to Mark position in a list of files like in text editors like Vim. E.g. I have a particular track selected in a long list of tracks. I mark the position as e.g. 'a'. Search for another track. Then want to go back to the marked track by going to mark 'a'. Marks 'a-z' might be possible.

I realise MBee is a forbiddingly complex piece of a software already. I've been using MBee for several years and still I forget how to do something and it takes ages to find out how to do what I want. I'm not sure MBee should get any more complex I guess I was hoping in original post that this was something possible.

[Zak]

As you've realised yourself, MusicBee's Search functions would be more accurately called Filter because that is what they do.
By far the most common use case will be "I want to quickly find this one track/album to add it to my Playing Tracks queue" for which they works very well.

It would be nice to have a particular kind of search that does not show *only* tracks matching search results, but simply goes to the first match in the long list of tracks, similar to the way a simple text editor like Notepad does.

To fully address your requirements will require a Wishlist forum request.

Best suggestion I have to achieve this - after not much thought - is an additional option on the search context menu:



Perhaps a Do Not Filter Results toggle. When enabled, searches would only select (not filter) the next (not first) matching track among those already displayed.
Partnered with this would be a Find Next command - only enabled when the first toggle is also enabled - which would allow you to keep selecting the tracks matching your criteria until you find the particular one you need.

(As an aside, note the Search Results sub-menu includes an option to Always Show the Entire Album when performing a search. Depending on how you have otherwise tagged your recorded files, this might already help you identify tracks within a broader context.)

Also nice would be a way to Mark position in a list of files like in text editors like Vim. E.g. I have a particular track selected in a long list of tracks. I mark the position as e.g. 'a'. Search for another track. Then want to go back to the marked track by going to mark 'a'. Marks 'a-z' might be possible.

I can't imagine anything like that ever being implemented as described here because there probably aren't enough use cases that would benefit (and as you say, would just be an extra layer of complexity).
What you can already do though is show a list of tracks and include the check mark column. This will let you 'mark' any number of tracks across any number of searches and then later reselect them in one batch to perform other commands on.

[Steven]

I have added support for finding rather than filtering in the main panel search. Its in the next v3.6 update