[Solved] Request for Ability to Search Through Comments and Years

[Wildfowl]

Dear Poweramp team,

I've been a longtime user of Poweramp and I have to say, it's hands down the best music player on Android. I've been using it for over 10 years now and I couldn't imagine using anything else. The sound quality, customization options, and overall user experience are just amazing.

However, I do have a small feature request. I often add comments to my music, such as notes about a particular song. It would be really helpful if there was a way to search through these comments within Poweramp itself, rather than having to scroll through all of my music manually to find what I'm looking for.

Similarly,  I think it would be great if Poweramp had a year search feature. For example, if I wanted to find all the songs in my library that were released in 2013, I could simply type "2013" into the search bar and Poweramp would show me all the songs released in that year. This would be a quick and easy way to organize my music by release date.

As an example, if I searched for "2013", the results page could show me all the songs released in 2013, such as "Ordinary Love" by U2, along with other songs that were released in that year.

 

I hope you'll consider these suggestions for future updates to Poweramp. Thank you for all your hard work on this amazing app!

[andrewilley]

You can already search for Years, just enable that item in the List Options menu from the Search page and you can see results such as:

Comments are more tricky, as PA does not display comments in the Search results, and doing so could make the results page horribly long - unless perhaps it only showed a few words around the searched term? The same would apply to searching Lyrics. I'm not even sure whether Comments and Lyrics are even stored in the database anyway, for size reasons, I suspect they may only be loaded on-the-fly when required for viewing (like cover art).

Andre

[Wildfowl]

Thank you for your response.

I think limiting the number of words displayed in the search results would be a good idea to avoid a long page when searching for comments, maybe to the first 15 letters? Perhaps this feature could be added to the Experimental Features section of the app (or beta version) to allow users to test it out. #fingercrossed

 

As for the year part, I was under the impression that it would show a separate list of all the albums released in the year 2013, similar to how it shows albums when we search for any artist.

 

 

 

 

[andrewilley]

The Search Results page has two levels:

The first level shows the selected categories in which the search string was discovered. So for "198" in Years you might see 1981, 1982, 1983, etc. For "and" in Albums you might see "Graceland", "The Hands of Man", "Beauty and the Beast Soundtrack" etc. Or for "and" in Artists it might be "Band Aid", "The Rembrandts", "Spandau Ballet", etc.

The second level, which you get to by tapping on any result, shows the list of songs available within that Year, Album, Artist, Genre, etc. So in your example, when you tap on an Artist's name in the search results, you will be shown all of that artist's songs, not their albums.
 

As I said earlier, I don't think the Comments tag is actually stored in the library database in the first place (neither is Lyrics) and if that's the case it wouldn't be possible to do a fast search for the contents of those tags - you'd need to open and read every single file in your music collection to check.

Andre

[Wildfowl]

I saw in some previous posts that you recommended using Genre instead of comments for the same purpose. I'm considering opting for that, btw thanks for your time.

[andrewilley]

@Wildfowl Depends on the purpose I guess, there's nothing to stop you creating your own Genre terms if you want to.

Andre