Search returns to many hits for "albums" and "all songs"

[6b6561]

Build: 884

I guess this is not anything new, probably been around since a long time. And I see this as a bug and not a feature request.

I would expect search to only return a list of "Albums" where the album title matches the search string but it looks like it also returns "Albums" where artist matches the search word. For an example a search for "one" returns things like:

• Album: "Klassikot"        Artist: "Hassisen Kone"
• Album: "Up All Night"   Artist: "One Direction" (I will never admit that I have this in my library)

Same is valid for "All songs", here I would expect the search to match on song title only. A search for "One" returns songs like:

• Title: "Angel"                Artist: "Aerosmith"         Album: "Big Ones"
• Title: "Gotta Be You"   Artist: "One Direction"    Album: "Up All night"

This often makes the search result lists quite long to scroll through.

[andrewilley]

When in the Search screen, use three-dots-menu > List Options to define which type of results you'd like to see.

Andre

[6b6561]

@andrewilley the problem is that a search for "one" as an example lists the album "Klassikot" as a match because the artist "Hassisen Kone" matches the search string.

[6b6561]

Here is a screen shot for a search of "boy", I would only expect U2's Boy and The Cures album to pop up under "albums".

[andrewilley]

Yes, it looks for any simple substring match, not a whole-word search. I think most modern searches work that way don't they? Certainly Windows file search does, it does an implied DOS-style search for *boy*, as do things like looking for text in emails, documents, etc.

Andre

[6b6561]

Sub-string matching is fine, but Album category shouldn't show matches where the match is on the artist. The Forrest Gump soundtrack pops up just because there is a track by Beach Boys.

[6b6561]

@maxmpcould you please take a look at this? I guess it would be rather easy to tweak the search strings in the next build?

• Albums - Match on "Album title", return album titles
• All Songs - Match on "All Songs", return matching tracks

[6b6561]

Here is one attempt to make it clearer what I'm ranting about, it's quite clear in the screenshots when they are zoomed into "1 line".

The search word is "boy" in both screenshots, one screenshot for returned albums and one for songs. There are quite a lot of albums returned because either the artist or album artist matches boy and same for songs.

IMHO Albums should only show albums where the title contains the search word and All songs should only return songs where the song title matches.

[6b6561]

Bumping this old bug hoping that @maxmp would have time to have a look at this after the huge effort to bring PA to the required SDK.

[andrewilley]

Ah, having re-read this I think I finally get what you were asking for! LOL

What seems to happen at the moment is one overarching search occurs, looking for any pattern matches within field such as Title, Album, Artist, Folder, etc. And then those bulk results are displayed in various different ways down the page (probably repeating some items).

What you would like to see is for the All Songs subsection to only show those items where the SONG TITLE contained a match, and the Albums subsection should only show results that match within their ALBUM TITLE, etc. (The Artists, Folders and Composers sections seem to work as expected for me, it's Albums and All Songs that are the main problem).

That actually makes a lot of sense to me. Oh, and it would be nice to have the facility to see results for filenames as well as folder names.

Andre

[6b6561]

I need to work on my presentation skills! 🙂

It's confirmed, you got it. Let's just hope that this gets fixed and I can't imagine that this would take much effort to fix.

[maxmp]

@6b6561 I guess this can be done if "1-line" view mode is activated for the search pane (search just titles), though this may confuse user in some other cases, like search from the specific playlist, where you can have 2 lines layout and you can search for the artist/album

[andrewilley]

I think the request is actually simpler than that. The display format is fine, it's the actual results that don't make sense for Albums and All Songs.

The subsection lists for Folders, Artists, Composers, and Album Artist all work as expected (shown below). For example, if I search my library for the word "Light" then the only result in the Composers section is a single item, "Lightbody" for Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol who is listed as one of the composers of "Chasing Cars". Similarly, the Folders section only shows four results, for all of which the FOLDER name contains the string "light", and similarly for Artists or Album Artists.

 

However in the Albums subdivision, there are lots of unexpected results where the Album Title does not contain the word "light". And similarly, the All Songs list contains lots of entries where the Song Title tag does not contain "light".

So the request is for all subsections to behave in the same way as Folders, Artists, Album Artists, and Composers, and only show results that match for that category field, not for all the other tags in the same songs (which are already listed in other subsections).

At least that's how I now understand the request anyway. 

Andre

[6b6561]

@maxmp @andrewilley 100% correctly understood.

So it's just the "Albums" and "All songs" search match that must be fixed, everything else is perfect as it's.

• "Albums" search category should only return  album titles that match search string.
• "All songs" search category should only return song titles that match search string.

[6b6561]

The new "Search Track Title Only" in build 922 fixed the issue for "All songs", which was the bigger of the two issues for me. The issue is still there for "Albums" but that's not such a big problem, at least for me.

I would say that doing this as an option was a bit of overkill, but good if there is someone out there who likes the old way.

Anyway, a very BIG thank you for fixing the "All songs" search! This really made my day!

Thank you @maxmp!

[6b6561]

And the same in song titles! Thank you!

[andrewilley]

Working fine for me too in the All Songs section, now only song titles which directly match the search term are displayed. I tend to agree that including it as a somewhat obscure item within Settings seems a bit overkill, just adding a new "Titles" tickbox to Search's existing set of displayable List Options would have been fine. And I'd still like to see a List Option to display results for filenames too. 

As you say, the Albums section does still shows results that don't match the search for Album Title though, it seems to also be matching for any contained Artist:
.

Andre

[6b6561]

@maxmp the search is broken, could you please have a look at it again.

 

[andrewilley]

@6b6561 Assuming your issue is with the 'All Songs' search results showing matches from Artist/Album names too, have you enabled Settings => Library => Search => Search Track Titles Only ?

Andre

[6b6561]

Just realized that was the problem.