Re: [Banshee-List] Music Search

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 13:40 -0400, Josiah Ritchie wrote:
> I'm finding myself somewhat bound by banshee's capabilities to give me
> the music I want at any time. For example, if I want to listen to all
> my Switchfoot and Third Day songs I have to create a playlist, that I
> may use only once, then search for Switchfoot. I then add them to the
> playlist. Then I clear the search and look up Third Day and add them
> to the playlist. It would be nice to do something like search
> Switchfoot OR Third Day (a boolean search) to provide a shorter method
> that doesn't create a permanent playlist.

We've been working on search in CVS/HEAD. Currently OR isn't supported,
but I'd certainly accept a patch to add that. The current functionality
is:

Search terms are tokenized by a space, multiple tokens are ANDed.
Negation is supported by prefixing a token with a -

> I remember there used to be a browser plugin. Is this available still?
> I think that provided about the same sort of thing I wanted, but in a
> more graphical way. In truth, I prefer the simplicity of a search to
> the point and click method, but beggars can't be choosers. :-)

There was never a browser plugin. There was an inefficient browser
patch. The iTunes-browser style of filtering is a pet-peeve of mine, and
we can do much better. It's not a major priority right now with the
current code base, but will become priority when I can finish up the new
data model for sources. Views will be faster, and easier to write
efficient and intuitive filter UIs on top of them. When the necessary
pieces are in place, I will implement something that is more effective
than the browser. 

For now, I'd like to focus on making search even more powerful, and of
course, we're continuing to work on the smart playlist plugin in
-official-plugins.

> Finally, is there a repository setup somewhere for the most up-to-date
> versions of Banshee for Ubuntu Dapper like there was for Breezy?

If there are unofficial repositories out there... just know that they
are... unofficial, and unsupported. We have a stable branch for a
reason. I'm of the opinion that if you want to try unstable and bleeding
edge software, you should probably build it from source, from the
repository so no false sense of stability is instilled.

--Aaron