Keyword Searching

Keyword searching is useful for finding items when you're not sure whether the text being searched for appears within the artist, album or song name, or when you want to perform an AND search that includes the artist name, album name and the song title (normally you can't specify your search on more than one).

As an example, classical music tagging is often inconsistent in that the composer may be used as the artist, within the album name or as part of the song title which makes searching for all things by Mozart, for example, difficult. However, a keyword search of "MOZART" will find anything by the artists "Mozart" or "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart", as well as the album "Complete Mozart Edition" and the track "March from Idomeneo by Mozart".

As another example, you know there's a song about love by Elvis Presley in there somewhere, but don't want to leaf through either all the songs about love, or your extensive Elvis Presley collection. Instead, you can keyword search for "LOVE" and "ELVIS" and you'll get the focused list you're after.

Keyword searches are entered by browsing into the "keyword" top-level lazy search menu item.

Using keyword searches should be pretty self-explanatory. Multiple words are entered separated by a long press of the "0" key (which shows as a comma in the search text), and spaces may be searched for by a short press of the "0" key. The results are filtered to those that match all keywords. Note that keywords can match anywhere within the song title, album title or artist name. The results are presented in the normal artist/album/song hierarchy and PLAY/ADD/INSERT is available from the remote control as usual. As an example, the keyword search "5683,35847" will perform that Elvis love song search described earlier (remember the comma is entered by a long press of the "0" key).

The minimum length of each keyword is four characters by default, but that can be changed through "Server Settings->Plugins" as for the other defaults. Also, you can press SEARCH to force a search even with short keywords (if there are at least two characters).

Note: If you're upgrading from a previous version of the plugin that didn't support keyword searches then the lazified database format has changed to support keyword search and this means the database needs to be re-lazified. The plugin will do this automatically the first time it is started (so no manual rescan should be necessary), but be aware that keyword searches won't find all the correct results until that process has completed.

Availability

Note that keyword searching is only available for use with SqueezeCenter 7.0 and SlimServer 6.5.