Search by filename despite tags?

[AudiOw]

Hi there,

I would like to search solely by filename, or at the very least that Poweramp prioritizes filename over tags. How do I do it please? I have music tracks I cannot find because those are tagged and don't show up in my search results (as I know them by their filenames).

Thanks!

Edited January 2, 2021 by AudiOw

[andrewilley]

At present, you can't. One of the potential issues with the Search system is that it searches more by existing PA Categories (such as "All Songs", "Folder names, "Album names", etc). As there is no category for filenames, you can't restrict the search results to see them - indeed, they will only show up in searches at all if there are no tags in the file so the filename is used instead as the Title tag.

Andre

[AudiOw]

24 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

At present, you can't. One of the potential issues with the Search system is that it searches more by existing PA Categories (such as "All Songs", "Folder names, "Album names", etc). As there is no category for filenames, you can't restrict the search results to see them - indeed, they will only show up in searches at all if there are no tags in the file so the filename is used instead as the Title tag.

Andre

Hi Andre,

Do you happen to know if this has already been brought up to the devs? Or I should suggest it (and if so - where)?

Thanks.

[andrewilley]

It has been discussed before, but with no firm answers worked out. I'll move this to Feature Requests for you.

Andre

[AudiOw]

13 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

It has been discussed before, but with no firm answers worked out. I'll move this to Feature Requests for you.

Andre

Thank you very much Andre!

[andrewilley]

Even I get a little puzzled by the search results sometimes.

For example, the All Songs list shows any songs that have matches in the Track Title tag as expected (or in the filename if there is no Title tag) but it also matches songs by their Album Title or Artist - but not Folder or Composer.

And the 'Albums' results sometimes makes no sense to me at all. For example, in a search for the word "Love" I get the three correct Album Title matches that I would expect - but also three random others that make no sense at all. It can't be because the word "Love" exists in a contained song as there should be dozens more matches if that is the case:

Andre

[6b6561]

I recently had a mail conversation on the search topic with Max and he said that he would have a look at the search logic in one of the next builds 

[andrewilley]

I think there definitely needs to be a way to enabled which tags / fields to search - Title, Artist, Album, Composer, Folder, Filename, etc - in addition to specifying how to format the results. And also the old method of being able to play through all of the filtered results without manually adding them to the queue was very useful.

Andre

[6b6561]

This sort of links back to my topic on what's returned by searches https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/19999-search-returns-to-many-hits-for-albums-and-all-songs/?tab=comments#comment-91900

My proposal is to start by cleaning up the search categories somewhere along:

• Albums search category - Match on "Album title" only - return only matching album titles.
• All Songs search category - Match on "Song title" only - return only matching songs.
• Rename search category "Album Artists" to "Albums by Artist", and return list of albums matching "Album artist" search string.
• Rename "Artists" to "Songs by Artist" and return all songs where the artist matches either TPE1 or TPE2.

This should be fairly easy to do and would make the search results readable.

Then we have the point of playing the results, you have the Play and Shuffle buttons already at the top of the search page, but at the moment it's quite useless due to the way the searches are built.

• My proposal here is that the search category names would be made list entries, so long pressing for instance "All Songs" would select all the songs returned by the search and you could then hit play.

And in regard to original posters request, I would suggest:

• Add "Filename" search category - Match on filename - return matching songs.

So we got three topics into the same chain, cleanup of search results, how to play search results and Filename search.

[andrewilley]

I tend to agree with most of that, each search mode should return specific results limited to that tag/field, rather than just specifying categories to group the results from all tags in.

I would propose the following search criteria (with more than one being settable at once in order to widen any given search - e.g. to search for Songs, Albums and Filenames in one go) with List Options only being used to choose how to display/sort the results:
All Songs
Filenames
Albums
Folders
Artists
Album Artists
Composers
Genres
Years (perhaps including an option to also show items before or after the search criteria?)
* Playlists
* Streams

*Personally these two seem a bit pointless, but I'm sure someone will want to search them at some point.

So the currently enabled search fields would be shown something like this (please forgive the messy Photoshop):

Andre

[AudiOw]

On 1/3/2021 at 4:16 PM, andrewilley said:

I would propose the following search criteria (with more than one being settable at once in order to widen any given search - e.g. to search for Songs, Albums and Filenames in one go) with List Options only being used to choose how to display/sort the results:
All Songs
Filenames
Albums
Folders
Artists
Album Artists
Composers
Genres
Years (perhaps including an option to also show items before or after the search criteria?)
* Playlists
* Streams

That's a terrific idea, Andre. I agree!