As I am not a fan of how album lists are displayed I think using Search would be better as that gives a display of album covers. In Artists view double clicking an artist gives a rather small window listing all albums and the tracks for each. Using Search gives a somewhat larger window with album covers, each double-clickable to take me to the album.
Trouble is search results are woefully incomplete. For example, I have 104 albums by Bill Evans, as shown in the first screenshot of his Artists view entry. But using Search shows only 12 albums.
When searching for albums the album results displayed are those albums with titles matching the search string. Similarly, artist results are those artists with names matching the search string and track results are those tracks with titles matching the search string. So from a technical perspective search is working as designed.
However, I understand your desire that search results be more comprehensive. Including the album artist in album search results could make sense.
Here is a question for consideration: what metadata fields do you believe should be matched for search results of each type (track, artist, album)?
Thanks but that is not how I would hope search would work in a situation as I set forth in the question.
Yes, search does give all appropriate results when I enter the artist’s name but that is nigh useless. Clicking Bill Evans “items” in the results view gives one set of results shown in the first image and also this third image which is when I am in Artists view, search on ‘Bill Evans’, hit return and get this page of results. Sure, clicking any one item gives album(s) but when there are more than a few the list is unusable. I can’t scroll through 104 albums. In fact even if there were say two albums playing just one from that view isn’t possible.
I would expect a useable results page of all albums by Bill Evans - a page of individual albums. This is what I get in Music.app - using the option+command+F search function (top right in the screenshot) and not the default Search at the top of the sidebar. (In the old days the option+command+F search was always. Now a user must invoke it upon every start. There is no “defaults write” command. Damn Apple.).
But! So back to the second image above. As I type search starts giving results (i.e. when I’ve typed ‘Bill’ I also see in the dropdown items for Billie Holiday, etc.) but once I type and then continue to ‘Evans’ I get only his. What is GREAT about this view is when I double-click an album shown Decibel goes to that album and plays only that album. What’s not great is what got me to start this thread. The dropdown shows but 12 albums.
It’s possible it isn’t working as intended. Did you delete your library before launching the new version? The search indexes are different and not compatible between versions.
Your assumption is correct! There could be from one to three files in ~/Library/Application Support/com.feisty-dog.Decibel/ depending on the state of the database:
How many tracks do you have and how long would you estimate it takes to load them? In my testing I usually can load around 22,500 tracks in 3 minutes or so.
59,247 tracks. Not sure how long it took. Started cooking and was done by the time we finished eating.
And, by the way, it effing works. Does exactly what I expect. In the Albums view I search on Bill Evans then hit return I get a page of his albums. In Tracks view I get them all. Etc.!
Nice. Now for the Composers view. :respect: :respect:
But a Composer view that showed a page of composers from which I could get to albums would be great. But I’m not sure it would be better than using the search results. In search results I get a page of a composer’s albums. I suspect that a Composers view would have items of individual composers and double-clicking a composer would give a side popoup window listing all the albums which I do not find useful.
The composers view, if it existed, would be similar to the artists view in the way you describe. Perhaps those views would be more useful with a different format- a list of people on the left with a track list on the right?
I’m glad the new searching is an improvement. I recently just added the genre as a searchable tag as well.
Whoa. Late last night I was thinking about a list view similarly but it was too late to trust my thoughts/writing. Not that at 70 at any time can they be trusted. What crossed my mind, using the Bill Evans example, was when searching in Albums view, instead of the round album images there would be a list of album titles. There would be more results on a page and more detailed album names. When an artist has a box set/multi-album release, the Albums page has each album shown but the titles are too often truncated. Bill Evans has an 8 CD set entitled ‘The Village Vanguard Secret Sessions’. In Albums view that is truncated to ‘The Village Vanguard Secret Ses…’ nevermind the album’s full title is ‘The Village Vanguard Secret Sessions CD8 - August 12, 1973’. Not a real issue as I can just count the albums. But there are a rare few where the distinguishing part of the title is not numerical so when truncated I would be at a loss. So, a list would handle that, sort of, minor issue.
But my problem with how you describe, again using Bill Evans, is it would be his name and a list of 1,636 tracks. Even if divided by albums, that is unwieldy, and there is still the issue of only playing one album from the list.
As is, the only way to play one album is choosing it from the Albums view after searching on the Artist.
Some type of dill-down ability in views? Say in Artist view I could then click an artist which would then give a page of albums from which I could choose?
