Filtering (2124)

[Barry4679]

MM5 Filtering is smart, but can be confusing
ie. which characters are invisible to MM5 search?
or when are blanks required in the search term?

These things can be deduced if you have enough time and patience, but initially they are confusing.

"frank z" finds Frank Zappa albums ... so does "frankz" ... but then "Frankro" does not return "Roxy & Elsewhere" by Frank Zappa
"pj" finds albums by P.J. Harvey, and "drj" finds albums by "Dr. John", but dj doesn't find Dr. John
"gris-" finds the album Gris-Gris by Dr. John, but it also finds all albums by David Grisman
"cc" finds "CC Rider" but not albums by "10cc"

"them" returns 2288 tracks (?!), including tracks like "Burning the midnight lamp" and "When the Music's over", which makes it harder to find Van Morrison's old band named 'Them"


it can be hard to predict how it will work ... say I am looking for the track "Jazz Police" by Leonard Cohen ... I can remember that it is "jazz ... ?something" ... so I type jazz and I get 8768 tracks due to my tracks with Jazz genre tags ... so i type "jazzc" and I get 28 tracks, but none by Leonard cohen "jazzl" is no good either ... "jazz coh" is better ... that does find my Cohen tracks, but also all of my jazz tracks by Al Cohn"

I wonder whether some of these smarts are worth having ... often I spend more time wondering why it returned all those tracks, than I would have spent finding the track via a less smart lookup function (ie. a lookup function as implemented in most other browser tools) ... the optional blanks is one example of something that creates more confusion than help IMO
"sit dead" returns "Sittin' On Top Of The World" by the Grateful Dead, but it also returns their track named "That's it for the Other One" ... is that helpful? maybe not.

Or I sit there wondering why something didn't work.
ie "zipad" finds "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah", but "zipadd" does not find the track ... why?
or. "frankzappar" finds the album "Roxy & Elsewhere" by Frank Zappa, but not the album "Return of The Son of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar" also by Frank Zappa ... why?

Maybe a tool that is only semi-smart but is predictable, is better than a tool that sometime surprises by being better than you assumed, but also often confuses because the rules are complex, and are undocumented?

Also, I see this response in mantis to one of my related posts about MM5 filter facility.

5) Re. user feedback:
a) it would good if the entry field had a little "x" hotspot, so I could clear the search field.
I think the current implementation is cleaner and works just as well (double-click to select text and then type new search entry)

The "current implementation" is not that intuitive IMO
1. a double click selects just the last word of a search string ... "Dr. John" ... a double click only selects "John" ... so If i want to search for Rolling Stones, the double click method gives me "Dr. Rolling"

2. most skins I have tried do not show the double click selection adequately ... ie. enter "dr. j" .. double click ... can you see that just the "j" is selected? I cannot. (tested with both material Design skins ... I also looked at Black Monkey skin ... that's better, but confusing, ie. the "j" is highlite, but the "dr." has a red underscore (?)

btw: dump id 76386157 when changing skins so I can check what I am saying here. ... is one of the nasty dumps where MM5 disappears from the task bar, and hides the screen's desktop (it all does black ... wallpaper, icons, everything ... which is confusing) .. have to open the Task manager, and find & terminate the (invisible) MediaMonkey task

[jiri]

Hi Barry,

the search by default starts at word boundary, but ignores any subsequent spaces within one field. Apart from this, it is able to ignore diacritics, but doesn't have any other feature to e.g. handle typos. Hope that this answers most of your questions. However, some things probably can be improved, e.g. that 'them' example, we're looking into it.

Jiri

[Barry4679]

Hope that this answers most of your questions.

thanks. ... the "questions" were mostly trying to make the point that MM5 filtering is initially confusing .. and could appear to be broken

Your answer lead me to look further into this apparent anomaly, because you made it clear that the ignored blanks are applied only within a single tag.

"frankzappar" finds the album "Roxy & Elsewhere" by Frank Zappa, but not the album "Return of The Son of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar" also by Frank Zappa ... why?

It seems to be matched due the track path ... I have posted before, that IMO including path and file name matches during filtering is as large a source of confusion, as it is helpful. ... Maybe it would be better if "\" and "/" where not invisible during path matching.
Or that by default the filtering facility operated on tags only.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u2l2kvbl9zs2pce/roxy.png?dl=0

And in the case of the album which was "missing", it was ripped from a box set, which lead to it's path name not relecting its album name.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2d1acd64h4rkl ... g.png?dl=0

In the above example I have two albums, one got chosen, the other didn't ... (surprise) ... that could introduce doubt about MM5 filtering couldn't it ... do other engines do this blank ignoring thing?

And it didn't help below where the apostrophe in in "that's" caused the "s" to be treated as the start of a new word.

"sit dead" returns "Sittin' On Top Of The World" by the Grateful Dead, but it also returns their track named "That's it for the Other One"

I still cannot see an explanation to this. ... you skip a max of 2 "diacritics"?

ie "zipad" finds "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah", but "zipadd" does not find the track ... why?

btw thanks for teaching me a new word "diacritics" ... in English that seems to refer to marks or accents added to a letter ... something that is not commonly part of the English language. ... it does not refer to things like "-" or "/" .... the common name for these type of characters is punctuation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation_of_English

I only mention this pedantic point because you have used (misused?) this uncommon term in the MM5 GUI at Tools|Options|Library|Search|SearchMode

[jiri]

thanks. ... the "questions" were mostly trying to make the point that MM5 filtering is initially confusing .. and could appear to be broken

We consider removal of the search feature that skips spaces, as it probably isn't useful in most cases and can be a source of confusion.

It seems to be matched due the track path

Seems so. This can be solved by manually disabling Path field search in options. I'd rather keep ignoring slashes, as it can be useful in cases like 'ac/dc' vs 'acdc' search.

e "zipad" finds "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah", but "zipadd" does not find the track ... why?

Sounds ok to me, as you'd have to search for "zipade" to get a match.

btw thanks for teaching me a new word "diacritics"

Right, this isn't an issue in English, but it's more important e.g. in Czech (my language), where it's very useful to find letters like 'á' by typing just 'a'.

Jiri

[Barry4679]

I'd rather keep ignoring slashes, as it can be useful in cases like 'ac/dc' vs 'acdc' search.

I was meaning to stop ignoring slashes in just the path column, because it is most likely to be confusing there.

Example "airpo" ... the album "Pocket Symphony" by the band "Air" is matched ... this is likely to lead people tio think that the blank is optional between columns, ie, the blank between the band and the album names ... but this is not the case, it is matched just because of the track path of xxx\Air\Pocket Symphony\xxx, since the slashes are ignored.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/t5kqm05749wfs ... o.png?dl=0

It is complicated enough, without introducing all the false positives from path concatenations. ... ie. if I change the filter string to "air po", the result includes the following tracks.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ddtt5td20qck7 ... o.png?dl=0

I have to look hard to many of them to understand why they are included. ... it gets much more complex if the path column, which probably is not even on display, has introduced many more unexpected matches. ... It makes it slow to learn how MM5 filtering is working

The AC/DC argument is good. It helps with other bands also ... eg. I have albums where the cover spells the artist as "Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds", but it is "Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds" on many other albums.

But then I also have albums by a band named "Woven Hand" on some albums, and as "Wovenhand" on others ... the optional blank rule would help in that case, but I agree with your current thinking, that this introduces more false positives (and probably support queries) than it would help by rescuing bad filter strings. ... and it makes MM5 harder to learn

Sounds ok to me, as you'd have to search for "zipade" to get a match.

OK, thanks .... another example of the optional blank thing making the whole picture harder to understand or explain.
In the illustration above, the filter criteria of "air po" matched the track "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" from the album "A Rainbow in Curved Air"
Since "po" matched Poppy, I guessed that the two d's in "zipadd" would match "Doo-Dah" ... but wrong. thanks for explaining.

Right, this isn't an issue in English, but it's more important e.g. in Czech (my language), where it's very useful to find letters like 'á' by typing just 'a'

OK, sorry ... I assumed that in the quote below, when you said "diacritics", you were meaning all the punctuation characters that MM5 search ignores (eg, -\? etc etc) as well all those foreign (to me ) characters.

the search by default starts at word boundary, but ignores any subsequent spaces within one field. Apart from this, it is able to ignore diacritics, but doesn't have any other feature

Then I thought that maybe the MM5 reference to "diacritics", in Tools|Options|Library|Search|SearchMode option setting, may be also refer to the punctuation marks also.

[jiri]

OK, thanks for all the examples, we plan few tweaks for the next version, so please report back in case you'll find more issues then.

Jiri