Request for better search system

[Randog]

Hi,

 

I use Poweramp to manage the music in my phone, and current search system brings me inconvenience in two ways.

 

Firstly, when I use the search system, inputting just one single letter won't work, of course, results won't be displayed if you just input an "A". I know it's common practice, but as I'm not an English speaker, the music I daily listen to always contain non-English information such as Japanese kanji or Chinese characters, in these two language, one character often maps to one word. I mean, when I search for a song which title is just one character , it won't work. As the pictures below, title of the song is "虹", just one character, and I could find it only through the artist.

So I request for improvement of search system: when using these two language(Japanese and Chinese), cancel the "one-letter restriction". Maybe using the Unicode? I'm not a professional.

 

Secondly, why I could not search the songs by filename? As I could sort them by filename, the search options do not contain filename, I don't understand why. FB2k could do this.

 

That's all, thanks.

[Bencherished]

I can understand what you mean, but you see, in sorting of songs were the tags are done correctly, it is difficult to find a single song that will not have a single alphabet relating to all songs in the library, so asking Poweramp to suggest song at a stroke of a single letter is like telling it to show all songs, and that counterproductive. 

I will suggest that you group your songs in folder, example, in your root memory (Music - Blues - Artist - Album Year etc) this way you can easily use folders to search. 

[John Titor]

3 hours ago, Bencherished said:

so asking Poweramp to suggest song at a stroke of a single letter is like telling it to show all songs, and that counterproductive

Probably not as counterproductive as it sounds, in some languages, just one character could mean a whole word or sentence (yes those kanjis, Chinese, and arabic characters), unlike English. I for one think this would enhance search experience.

[andrewilley]

I agree. Unless there's technical reason (database response speed for such a potentially large set of results?) it seems a good idea to display the initial results based on the first typed letter - especially for non-alphabetic character sets.

Also, not being being able to search for filenames is a bit of a bugbear of mine too, and this request has come up a few times in the past, such the below thread. My proposed solution in that thread seems to cover the request here too:

Andre

[Randog]

14 hours ago, andrewilley said:

I agree. Unless there's technical reason (database response speed for such a potentially large set of results?) it seems a good idea to display the initial results based on the first typed letter - especially for non-alphabetic character sets.

Also, not being being able to search for filenames is a bit of a bugbear of mine too, and this request has come up a few times in the past, such the below thread. My proposed solution in that thread seems to cover the request here too:

Andre

Thank you for contribution!

Internationalization of application is not an easy thing especially for those non-alphabetic languages. Inherent logic of those languages may be hard to be understood, as they have at least 3000 different letters( in different codes) instead of 26 ones. I have encountered the same "one-letter restriction" problem in several applications such as telegram when searching, while indigenous applications run well. However, as music tags searching system doesn't need to run text segmentation, I suppose it might not be a technical challenge, maybe. I will appreciate it if this improvement could be accepted and be achieved.

As for searching by filename, to speak frankly, I don't see it in any music player on mobile terminal. Maybe developers have deeper consideration, that's OK.

Thank you again for your work!

[MotleyG]

The current search method works while typing. So starting a search with a single character will likely break that due to the number of instant hits. It may require the user to press return before executing the search to make single characters work in the future. If so this “fix” will break the current simplicity for others.